NB. This review is for the Hotel Villa Fontaine Nihonbashi Hakozaki. The hotel has changed its name and I have asked for this to be moved across to the right listing here.
LocationIt was a bit of a spur of the moment thing to book out holiday to Japan. We both really wanted to see Tokyo, but weren’t sure where to book. In the end we decided to do what usually suits us, which is to book somewhere outside of the very centre of the city and then to travel in by metro or walk to places.
The area that the hotel is in is definitely a business part of the city. It’s just a couple of roads away from a huge IBM building and next to two other pretty big office blocks. We also saw loads of people on their lunch break each day rushing around in suits or going to relax by the river. A real bonus for us of being situated in this district was that it had 3 metro stops very close to the hotel on a couple of different lines. It was also (for us) a walkable distance to see sites of interest in the capital nearby. There is one big shrine in Nihonbashi, and on our first day while we were waiting to check in to the hotel, we walked right into the centre of Tokyo and got as far as the imperial palace. Do bear in mind that this was walking at a pretty fast pace for a few hours though.
If the location of the Nihonbashi Hotel Villa Fontaine wouldn’t suit your holiday needs then it’s worth remembering that this is a chain of hotels. We saw quite a few of these across Tokyo, including one in Ueno and also Otemachi.
We stayed in the Hotel Villa Fontaine in Nihonbashi for 10 nights and I would definitely recommend it. There is always the worry when booking just one hotel for a longer period that it might not be that great and then you’re stuck there for the whole duration. However, this was not the case with Hotel Villa Fontaine.
Booking
My partner booked the hotel through Expedia along with our flights as a package. Removing the cost of flights this meant that we were able to book a double room for 10 days for about £400, that’s roughly £40 a night. This is an utter bargain compared to pretty much anywhere else in Tokyo centre.
Aside from the price, other selling points to this hotel are that it includes a free breakfast each morning and also free wired Internet. We brought a laptop with us and found the latter incredibly useful when trying to make sense of things we’d seen each day and to plan the next.
Getting to the hotelWe flew into Narita airport, Tokyo, and there were a range of different options to get into the city. One easy option is to use the Airport Limousine bus (an orange coach) that terminates at the T-CAT. This is the Tokyo City Airport Terminal, and is about two roads away from the hotel itself. Alternatively you can also get a rapid train service, but this seems very expensive for the slightly faster journey.
We found that the cheapest and easiest route for us was to go by the local stopping service train and then transfer to the metro. My partner had done a lot of research about this as we were forewarned that the Tokyo metro system can be a bit confusing to a newcomer.
All the lines have names, but also letters and then each stop on the line additionally has a number. Add to this the fact that a lot of the signs are written in Japanese script and different lines are owned by different companies and it can seem quite daunting! After a bit of getting used to, this was pretty straight forward in the end and the hotel was really easy to find with its big green light up sign running down the side of the building.
Checking in
We actually turned up in Tokyo far too early to check in, but the hotel staff were lovely and took our bags so we could have a wander around the city. We came back to check in at 3pm and it was very simple. The staff, and indeed most people we came into contact with in Japan, don’t speak very much English (and sometimes none), but they certainly have more English than we have Japanese. They were incredibly polite and we got by with lots of pointing for any questions out of the ordinary!
They let us know the times for our inclusive breakfast each morning and gave us a key card for our room.
The hotel and the room
The hotel has 12 floors and two lifts. Level 1 is the reception and breakfast area, levels 2-11 are rooms, and level 12 includes rooms and a washing machine and dryer. We didn’t use this as we had brought tons of clothes with us, but it seemed a pretty reasonable price.
Being Tokyo, the room was incredibly small. But it was just what we needed and was really clean and well presented. The view wasn’t anything special – of the office building opposite – but the window let in lots of light and the curtains went the length of the far wall. The room include a double bed, a desk, a large flat screen TV, an Internet connection, a fridge (empty to put our own bits in!), an AC unit, tea making facilities, a hairdryer, a bedside table with built in alarm clock, a small hanging area, a clean set of pyjamas each (!!) and a bathroom.
The bathroom included towels and also Japanese slippers. Every day the hotel maids would clean the room, provide us with new plastically sealed cotton pyjamas and replace anything we’d used in the bathroom. This was pretty well stocked, with large dispensers of shower gel, shampoo and conditioner. In a separate holder the hotel also provided a razor, cotton buds, two shower sponges, two toothbrushes with toothpaste, two foldaway hairbrushes, and a sachet of shaving gel. If we’d so much as taken one of these items out of the dispenser, we were provided with a new one the next day.
There was a nifty system of placing magnetic signs on the front of your door if you didn’t want something replaced (e.g. towels, razors, sheets, etc). Each of these magnetic signs (and the ‘do not disturb’ sign) were located on the back of the metal door to the room, and you just moved them to the outside for the staff to see each day.
On our final day we actually left the ‘do not disturb’ sign up as we needed to use the room over the period in which it was usually cleaned and we weren’t that bothered about having new towels and things when we were leaving early.
But when we popped out and left the sign on, we were pleasantly surprised to find a large bag hanging on the handle of our door on our return. They hadn’t been in the room, but the bag contained new towels, new amenities and even new PJs, just in case we wanted them. I thought this was a really nice touch and showed that the guests were trusted (no counting towels in and out!).
Breakfast
Over 10 days we got to see how the rotation of foods at the inclusive breakfast worked. This was 7 – 9.30 on weekdays and 7.30 – 10 on weekends. There were some main staples there each day, including sliced bread, rolls, croissants, bread with what I think was green tea flavour marbled through it, an egg of some sort (hard boiled or scrambled), salad, clam chowder and jams. Then an item of meat was rotated between small American hotdog-style sausages, mini hamburgers and meatballs. There were also toasting machines provided for heating things up and a microwave in the corner which had a sign saying to use it freely.
Overall
I was very impressed with this hotel. The staff were unfailingly polite, even the maids that bumped into us in the hallways would stop and bow deeply. The rooms were clean and the showers were hot and powerful. It was a nice touch having the Japanese PJs each day, even if it did seem a bit of a waste for them to turn up in cellophane each time.
The very large Royal Park Hotel just around the corner from the Hotel Villa Fontaine is its most obvious competitor and a much more obvious tourist hotel. There are certainly lots of signs for it (and even a direct phone line) from the T-CAT and I think it has 4 star status, but the Villa Fontaine was perfect for our needs, clean, friendly and at an excellent price as well.
Internet, breakfast and a great price in Tokyo 
