APA HOTEL Roppongi Six — Hotel in Tokyo

I hated this hotel. The rooms aren’t bad - the room and bathroom are ok-sized compared to other places we stayed at during our trip. However, the customer service was awful and the location was not the best.

First of all, the area isn’t bad, but to get to Roppongi station (which is the main station to get to most places), you have to climb up this hill which was just annoying. We ended up trying to find alternate routes by taking trains from Roppongi Itchome station which is closer and not as gruelling of a hike, but that line doesn’t take you everywhere. So next time, I would choose a hotel that’s a bit closer to the main stations and does not require climbing hills to get there, especially when you’re already tired and your feet are dying.

Secondly, the customer service was horrid. Nobody at the front desk speaks enough English to really have a conversation, and I get that we are in Japan and it’s a different country, but if you are running a hotel for foreigners to stay in, it is nice to have someone who you can have an adequate conversation with, especially if it’s about something important. We never had this issue with any of the other hotels we’ve stayed at.

My husband had left his ring at our previous hotel in Osaka, and we when we arrived to Tokyo, we asked the front desk if they could call the Osaka hotel to ask them if they could mail the ring to this hotel. The front desk clerk called the number and handed the phone to us to speak to the other hotel (which is fine, but just unexpected because all of our other hotels helped us talk on the phone when sending our luggage to our next hotel). We were told the ring would get to us the following day between 9am-12pm. What was annoying was, the front desk told us that the hotel could not pay for it for us and charge us later, and refused to take any cash or to keep our credit card number, so we were just required to literally sit in our hotel room the next morning and wait for this ring. We ended up cancelling our reservations and plans that day, which was so annoying, and we went back to the front desk to just ask if they could keep our credit card number on file and charge us for it later so that we could explore the city and not waste the day sitting in the hotel, but they refused. I understand it might be a hotel policy, but it just bothered me that there was no empathy, and the hotel staff did not care or seem to want to help us. It bothered me that he didn’t try. He simply said “no sorry” and I feel like he didn’t even understand half of the things I was asking and instead of trying to seek clarity or to ask someone else for help, or to get a manager or ANYTHING he just said “no” because it was the easiest thing for him to do.

I ended up going out on my own while my husband waited for his ring (which arrived at 3pm by the way) and I was outside the hotel trying to flag down a taxi, but I couldn’t get one for 5 minutes. I went back inside to ask the girl at the front desk if she could call one for me and she said it would cost ¥500 (around $5 CAD). TO CALL A TAXI?? Are you joking?? She said it’s better for me to just go back out there and try to flag one down. I asked her if there was a certain place I was supposed to stand, or if it was easier to flag down certain taxis (because there were a lot of different ones) and of course, she didn’t understand what I was saying and just said “no”. I ended up flagging one down, but I just find this hotel has very low effort in everything they do, and they just try to money-grabbing things (like charging $5 to call a taxi for you).

More evidence of low-effort is they don’t clean your room unless you ask by putting a sign on your door to clean. Which is so opposite of all of the other hotels we’ve been to, where they always clean the room unless you put a sign saying you don’t want it cleaned. Their elevators are also the worst. The have ONE for each “building” and it’s so slow and is always packed. Good luck if you’re trying to check out with multiple luggages.

GO CHOOSE A DIFFERENT HOTEL AND...

Avoid APA Hotels.

The hotel looks good for the first look, but unfortunately it is quite inadequate.

The air conditioning does not work and can only supply air based on the pre-set hotel settings. If the hotel is on a heating setting, then the AC can only heat - and it is all intentionally designed this way, which is very flawed. So if your room is too warm, there is no way to cool it down.

When raising this with the staff, they could not do anything about it and were rather agressive when discussing options. They might need training on customer handling.

They set our room to ventillation only, but that just kept on circulating the hot air inside. Also their other suggestion was to open the windows. Next to a main expressway. Great.

I would expect the staff to be more understanding, as the price is not so low. The hotel should serve the guests after all, especially if this expensive.

Also the rooms are super small, what they try to justify with energy savings, but it is obvious that the room size is just to have more guests crammed up. It is not a healthy sized space. So savings for the hotel maybe.

I understand if they reduce the room size, but then the prices should also reflect that. They should not promote paying full price for a quarter sized room. That is not a fair business model.

Beds are small, they only provide flat pillows. Also no puffy pillows are available, as all of them are in use? Seriously?

There are other fancy options like entertainment, but eventually they don't really make up for the missing basic features. First you need to make your hotel liveable before building in extras.

It looks like it wants to be a fancy hotel so badly, that it forgot about the basic features of a useful hotel.

So all in all, this hotel is a total let down and is expensive compared to what it provides. Asked for a full refund after our first night as we could not sleep any. They have still deducted the first night even if we could not do anything, which for some reason was almost double the price as any other nights. This was not listed anywhere at the time of booking of course.

Other decent hotels would have rather offered compensations for these serious flaws.

Anyway, we were happy to leave, so we agreed. Learnt not to come around these hotels ever again. We have lost a day of our trip in Japan and we ended up even more tired looking for another accommodation instead. Suggestion is to...

This was our first visit back to Japan in over a decade, having lived there for many years in the past. Obviously much changed ! APA Hotels a completely new presence and with huge number of hotels. I have to say the concept is very good and the prices apparently reasonable in today's Tokyo. Roppongi SIX was a collection of 4 or 5 single towers, very modern and conveniently close to Ark Hills and Roppongi crossing, so no argument with location. The rooms are tiny which is sort of normal for Japan. These we found very uncomfortable and glad we didn't bring the proverbial cat to swing. The endless instructions about cleaning were confusing though we understand and respect the intent (to protect the environment but really to reduce costs). Check-in was bizarre and I think I counted at least 4 trainees in the process. Before we were assigned a room one trainee told us to pick up our bags (delivered by Takyubin from Matsumoto) then realised we hadn't paid so were summoned back tot he check-in desk. There seemed to be one single elevator for the each building so the delays in waiting for lifts were very inconvenient and frustrating. I was more concerned about the safety aspects in case of fire or emergency. It didn't help that cleaning staff used the same single elevator so we often encountered delays as lifts stopped at various floors as cleaning staff went about their work. On one occasion with ourselves sharing the elevator with staff, they stopped at a floor to collect equipment.|Front desk staff were mostly useless and on one occasion downright rude (when we were checking out at 8 am Sunday 13 April). The day before I'd asked for info re taxis and were told (by a trainee) there would be a charge of 500 Yen to reserve, which was upgraded to 1000 Yen after consultation. Naturally we said : "arigata meiwaku" and flagged down a cab the following morning without problem.|The final inconvenience was the evening before departure when I asked to leave two large bags to store to avoid elevator delays the next morning. I was told this was impossible. After some discussion and referrral to an unseen "manager", it was agreed I could store the bags overnight. I expect we will never again bother to use an APA Hotel.|We avoided the breakfast (Y 1900 per person) reckoning it would always be overcrowded. Family Mart covered our daily need at a fraction...