Minn Ueno Shin-Okachimachi — Hotel in Tokyo

TLDR: Hotel gave my room to another family before we arrived; couldn’t provide satisfactory apology or compensation.

My first and last stay in this hotel.

Pro: Walking distance to Shin-Okachimachi station. I booked the 6pax room, very roomy and in good condition. Direct line to Asakusa, but need to change line for other major stations.

Cons:

1. We entered the door password, only to have the door bolted from and people speaking inside. Thankfully the family inside and ourselves all spoke Mandarin and could communicate. We both had the same room and password allocated (mine provided via email, theirs provided by web concierge upon check-in). We went to speak to web concierge (no on-site staff stationed at lobby). Web concierge directed us to the on-site staff, who couldn’t communicate in even simple English (all communication via google translate), couldn’t check any information or make any decision. She then called a 2nd web concierge who thankfully was fluent in Mandarin to communicate with both families; he explained that the room was allocated to us and the other web concierge had given away the room by mistake (Note: our names, length of stay and room type were COMPLETELY DIFFERENT). Ironically, the web concierge who made this mistake was also Mandarin speaking. It took them 1 hour to sort out this issue. Meanwhile, my husband and 2 kids (3 and 4) were just sitting on the floor with our luggage, tired after a long flight.

2. Other than a passing “sorry” by the 2nd web concierge who served us, no apology was given in person. No sincerity at all. As my young kids were very tired after a long flight, we stayed in the room without them cleaning it again (it was 5.30pm by then, god knows how long the cleaning will take). The other family had worn their shoes all over the carpet and continued to stay in the room while the hotel sorts out an alternative room for them. On-site staff did not ask them to leave our room or offer for them to wait somewhere else, further imposing on my very tired family.

3. I had to Line message hotel to get them to clean the room the next day. They had the audacity to say that they will provide the cleaning complimentary “as a compensation for the check in error”. Excuse me, I book a hotel room, it is bare minimum to expect a clean room. I was given a room where other people had sat on the sofa/bed, used the toilet and stepped their shoes all over the carpet. This cleaning was owed to me, yet they made it sound like they were doing me a favour! Seriously! When pressed, they offered me a late check out (12pm instead of 10am), which I declined as I had already planned my schedule around the original check out time of 10am, like a responsible traveller. They were unwilling to offer anything more than an apology via TEXT MESSAGE.

I have read of administrative screw ups in this hotel in other reviews but didn’t expect it to happen to me. So clearly, this is not the first time it happened. Book a stay at your own risk. I would stay far far away from this...

We stayed at the Ueno Shin-Okachimachi location for 6 nights after having a good stay last year in the Gyon location in Kyoto. Generally speaking, we had a good stay; the unit was clean, digital check-in / out worked smoothly and the on-site staff were super-helpful.

However, there are three things that I would highlight about this particular location that you might want to consider:

Location: This facility is clearly a renovated apartment building and you are in the middle of what is a really residential area. This is great in the sense that it's very quiet at night, but there are limited options for dining out, especially on nights when folks are typically dining at home (e.g. Sunday / Monday). You are right on-top of Shin-Okachimachi station, which is connected to the Oedo and Tsukuba Express lines. However, most touristy areas in Tokyo (outside of Asakusa) are not connected directly to these lines and you are committing yourself to either walking to Ueno station (~15 min away) or making some connections to get where you want to go.

Luggage Storage: Check out is 10 AM, which is an hour earlier than the standard time of 11 AM for most hotels in Japan. There is a location where you can store your luggage after checking out, but it is an unmonitored cabinet that is directly in front of the front doors and nowhere near the desk. There are locks in the cabinet for your luggage, but when we tried to use them, the staff explained that they don't work anymore. While Tokyo is generally a very safe city, we found this to be unnecessarily risky and added unnecessary stress to our last day in Tokyo. The only real alternative is to take your luggage to Ueno station and put it in a coin locker, but they do fill up early.

Heating / Cooling: There are standalone heating / cooling units in each unit and it was cool enough in Tokyo that we found that we wanted to use the heating in the evenings, but as soon as we would turn it on, we would both feel congested. I'm not sure the frequency with which these units are serviced / cleaned, but it felt like there could be allergens that were being pushed around everytime we...

Check in requires connecting to their WiFi (signal was not great inside the lobby area), scan the QR, and filling out information. We only stayed here for one night to recover from a long flight before moving on. We focused on decent reviews (basically not dirty), price, and location before finally deciding to book here. This feels like a typical apartment you can rent out. We unexpectedly found out they had a washer/dryer combination, which came in useful as we didn’t have all of our luggage. There is a conbini a short walk away. The room felt clean and had everything we needed. I even had to use the kitchen in the middle of the night due to jet lag and it came in very handy when having a late night meal with a 1 year old. There were two twin mattresses laid on the tatami mat with options to use futons left in the closet. We did not use the futons so no opinion on that. There is a low table on the mat, with 4x seat cushions.

A few things to consider: The window. There is a lot of light coming in at night and the curtain was sheer. However, it’s possible there was another blackout curtain that I just did not have the energy to find/see. The room seems to echo very loudly. As in, my toddler would try to walk and run around at night and it just seemed very loud. I was mainly concerned about him waking up neighbors and had to work really hard to keep him calm. Wouldn’t have been a problem if we weren’t jet lagged and concerned about getting complaints! Even tho we specified 2 adults, 1 toddler, we were only provided two bath towels. That said, I did not set service rating based on this since I don’t know if they would have given us another one if we asked. We didn’t have the energy to put in...