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51°F / 10°C
(Passing Clouds. Cool.)
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Although Yokohama is often thought of primarily as a residential city, it offers a wealth of fine accommodations for both tourists and business travelers alike, with rooms priced to suit all types and levels of budget requirements.
At the high end of the scale, you will find a cluster of top-class deluxe hotels in the futuristic port area called Minato Mirai. Among these are the sleek Pan Pacific Hotel Yokohama tower with its spacious balconied rooms overlooking the bay, the luxurious Yokohama Grand-Intercontinental with its extensive urban resort facilities, and the elegant Royal Park Hotel Nikko located right inside the nation's tallest building, Landmark Tower. The lodgings in these hotels are on a par with best world-class standards, and, on top of that, the surrounding area is crammed with a broad variety of shops, bars, eateries, amusement centers and tourist spots catering both to locals and foreign visitors.
Those seeking a stay closer to the heart of the city will find an abundance of recommendable first-class hotels in the lively Kannai district. Your options in this hotel category range from the classy Hotel Yokohama overlooking Yamashita Park, one of the city’s main tourist spots, to the cosmopolitan and sophisticated Yokohama Bay Sheraton Hotel & Towers and the family-oriented Holiday Inn Yokohama. All three hotels offer good Western-style lodgings plus the added advantage of an accommodating English-speaking staff trained to assist overseas guests with characteristic Japanese attention to courtesy and service.
Representative of mid-range accommodations in the port city are countless business hotels, such as the Business New Hotel Sansei across from Yokohama Stadium and the Hotel Rich Yokohama near Yokohama Station. Like anywhere in Japan, the compact rooms in Yokohama’s business hotels tend to be somewhat small by Western standards and are equipped with basic, no-frills facilities, but they are invariably clean and fully functional for short-term stays. Within this moderately priced class of hotels you will also find some real bargains, such as the Hotel New Grand, which blends its service and amenities with a tradition of hospitality stretching back nearly 75 years.
Global travelers who require budget lodgings are in luck when visiting Yokohama. Unlike in more expensive cities, there are numerous places where you can enjoy a very comfortable stay for JPY8,000 or less per night/single room. Your selection varies widely here - from relatively large properties, like the New Otani Inn with its 183 rooms, to tiny ones, such as the Daimaru Hotel with just 20. Do not expect much in the way of room space or business facilities in these hotels and be forewarned that communicating in English with the staff may be somewhat of a problem, but the low room rates are certainly hard to beat.
Oddly enough, if you are seeking truly authentic Japanese-style accommodations, you will find that Yokohama is one of the few cities in Japan where you encounter some difficulty locating such accommodations. Perhaps this is because Yokohama owes much of its growth to its historic beginnings as an enclave of the foreign community. Or perhaps it is because many of the older type wooden buildings more suitable for ryokans (Japanese inns) were destroyed during the 1923 earthquake and then by bombs during World War II. The wide selection of typical ryokan found in other cities is not readily available here. However, a day trip to a nearby onsen (hot springs resort), such as Torikyo, or to the neighboring historical and cultural city of Kamakura will provide you with plenty of places where you can experience and savor the laid-back Japanese ambience that you are looking for. Though you will probably want to quickly return to your Yokohama base, for it is very likely that you will fall in love, like so many before you, with the many and varied charms of Japan's most vibrant and thriving international port.
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