Visiting a new country in a wheelchair is often a fraught experience, and it definitely requires a lot of advance planning when you use an electric wheelchair that weighs 95kg and are travelling on your own.

My search for a truly wheelchair accessible hotel was complicated by places that assumed the presence of a carer who could manhandle you up a step with the help of the hotel staff: don’t assume that the presence of an accessible room is a guarantee of step free access in Tokyo. Fortunately, Hotel Mets Shibuya is fully accessible and has step free access from street and station.

Most wheelchair users will need what the hotel calls a “universal room”. This is located next to reception on the fourth floor, and has enough space to be able to get your chair in and manoeuvre. We did check out whether the single room would work, but the layout leaves a corridor just an inch or two wider on each side than my chair, such that I would either have to reverse into the room, or reverse out.

The universal room is a twin, and you will have to contact the hotel in advance to reserve it as you can’t reserve it online. However, if it is available and you want to pay before arrival, I found the hotel staff were happy for me to book the dates I needed online and then contact them to ensure they allocated the correct room.

My room was spotless, and the various items available on the amenity bar in reception are ideal for anyone who has forgotten essentials like a toothbrush - they have bamboo toothbrushes, rather than plastic, although I’d packed my own - or to grab top ups of tea for the room, or bath salts for the wonderfully deep bath tub. If you want coffee, there is a bean to cup machine available 24 hours in reception.

Staff are friendly and helpful here and also speak some English. I speak some Japanese, so we were able to communicate well enough, especially since I also had Google Translate set up to translate conversations as a back-up for when my Japanese wasn’t sufficient. Overall, this was a good, safe, clean base for my business trip.

A note about disabled accessibility. My experience is that most hotels expect a disabled guest to travel with a carer, so the accessible or barrier free room (as it’s often called) is generally a twin. In the case of this hotel, it also means that the bathroom is not fully accessible by UK standards. I’m fortunate that I can walk a few steps and get in and out of a bath or shower unaided, but a solo traveler who couldn’t walk would have been unable to use the bath/shower unaided. You don’t see many wheelchair users in Tokyo, and I’m told that the accessible room is more geared to travelling with an elderly relative who has limited mobility, than to providing something fully accessible the way it’s understood in the UK. This room and bathroom were fine for me, but ymmv.

Photo shows my chair parked in the hotel room lobby with view into the main room. Bathroom is off the lobby to the left. There is a power point in the lobby so it was easy to charge my chair.