Be it for business or leisure, your hotel stay should always be a pleasurable experience. With international brand names and local hotel franchises striving to offer you the sweetest dreams at the most comfortable prices on a silver platter, the customer is now truly spoiled for choice. So sit back, relax and pick your indulgence from the following excellent hospitality establishments.
The Royal Treatment
Royal Park Hotels offers more than the regular bed & breakfast
Toyohisa Miyauchi, President of Royal Park Hotels & Resorts, has an ambitious goal. He wants his hotels to serve the best breakfasts in Japan.
Though the Royal Park chain, currently with six hotels, may not be the first choice for foreign visitors to Japan, his corporate focus on “Best for the Guest” aims to change this state of affairs.
Traditionally, business visitors to Japan have been faced with a choice between business hotels that are cheap, but often somewhat cheerless, and tailored largely to the basic needs of Japanese business travelers; and large city hotels, which are international in style, luxurious, and correspondingly expensive.
Miyauchi’s aim is to provide a city hotel guest experience at a price which only slightly exceeds that of a business hotel, and he seems to be succeeding in this goal. The Royal Park chain, which started in 1989 with Hakozaki’s Royal Park Hotel, conveniently close to Tokyo City Air Terminal, comfortably scooped the pool in the 2009 J.D. Power Asia Pacific 2009 Japan Hotel Guest Satisfaction Survey in the 15,000 yen to 35,000 yen per night segment, as well as in 2007 and 2008. Singled out in the survey were food and beverage, hotel facilities, staff, and cost factors.
Though the group started as part of the Mitsubishi group’s real estate activities, it has broken somewhat free of these ties, and its more recent hotels use leased, rather than Mitsubishi-owned, sites. This trend is to continue with “The series” of new hotels to be opened in the near future, the first two of which will be Royal Park Hotel The Fukuoka (northern Kyushu) and Royal Park Hotel The Kyoto.
Miyauchi and the Royal Park Group have responded to the shifts in the market. In Japan as in the rest of the world, customers are starting to demand lower prices for high-quality services, and competition in the hotel business is fierce. A few years ago, there was a “mini-bubble” rush of foreign luxury hotels opening in Tokyo, but since the collapse of the financial sector in 2008, such hotels have had to cut prices dramatically in order to maintain viable occupancy levels. The new series of Royal Park hotels aims to provide a “compact city hotel experience” at an affordable price point – but without competing at the bottom sub-10,000 yen end of the market. Miyauchi’s goal is to provide accommodation in the 12,000 yen to 15,000 yen price range. In order to achieve this, he has looked at what guests actually need in such hotels, and has decided to eliminate facilities not required by those guests (for example, banquet rooms will not be a feature of the new “The series” hotels).
