A flurry of new-hotel building, massive renovations and even replacement of existing hotels is changing the face of Tokyo’s central area and some suburbs, largely spurred by the hope of profiting on the 2020 Olympics.
While much of Tokyo’s hotel construction in recent years has been by U.S. and European-branded groups (even though sometimes Japan-owned), Japanese daily paper Yomiuri Shimbun reports that more Japanese operators are getting into the growth. The paper comments that the wave of luxurious hotels one after the other is like a “war of hotels.” Hotel space shortages have been a Tokyo concern, with prices high and room-counts low for such a busy area.
The Olympic boom is going beyond the downtown area; lower-priced hotels for business travelers are popping up in suburban areas. And, aside from new construction, a number of hotels are taking on major renovation projects. One example: the Hotel Okura Tokyo, shown above, built just before the 1962 Olympics, will shut down in a few days so the owners can replace the entire structure with a larger, more modern, new building that will open in 2019, just before the Olympics.
More details HERE from Yomiuri Shimbun
