A month ago I was looking for a hotel room for New Years Eve and everywhere I checked on their hotel website said booked even when it would list rooms available on other websites. I found out a lot of places don’t update the English side of their web pages. Your best bet is to go to the page in Japanese and then just have Google (Chrome) translate it. I didn’t know if anyone else knew this but I could see how it would be an issue for first time travelers. I live in Tokyo by the way, but sometimes like to get a hotel in the city if I plan on drinking.
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Typically domestic hotels will have different groupings rooms they release for customers. And yes they’ll not release all rooms to their non-native customers. As they expect domestic travel agencies and travel websites to book these.
If you want to try for yourself I just pulled one at random. Check out the Shibuya Excel Hotel’s own website (NOT Priceline, Tvivago) in English for Oct 28th, 1 night, and it will say no rooms. They try it on their Japanese side. We found that 90% of the hotels in Yokohama had the same issue.
Honestly I put this down to Japanese being terrible with technology. Like seriously this country barely keeps the internet running.
Wait until you find out official Government websites are the same. English version are either outdated or incomplete.
I mean just in general I always recommend using the Japanese site over the English site. The Japanese site is often better and has more information.
Japanese site + Google Translate > official English site
I have been traveling a lot and found something interesting about new year eve, yes you are right they have rooms available but most of them don’t want you to book just one night, in many occasions I see that booking 30+31 together you’ll see rooms available but not for 31 only.
This isn’t just websites and apps, I’ve also noticed English menus often have fewer options. On one hand I do get it, tourists wouldn’t know the difference and staff wouldn’t be able to explain more intricate things. But it is annoying all the same. When friends visit I ask for the Japanese menu and just translate for them.
As in several countries in the world?
Service will always be better in the local language.
You should avoid using the English version of anything if you can add a general rule. It’s not the priority to update, except for places mainly targeting tourists.
Google translate everything in Japan, the English sites are worthless.
> Your best bet is to go to the page in Japanese and then just have Google (Chrome) translate it.
I also recommend actually learning Japanese, it’s faster and even more accurate
Go to the Narita express English page and tell me where the train timetable is.
Protip: There is none.
I mean the only reason someone would go to the Narita express page is to find out what time you can take the train to the airport.
This is for any website. You’ll often find options for English, and maybe even other languages. They almost always turn out to be static pages that were just added because the boss said they need one. Pretty much useless.
Never trust English versions of websites here.
are you telling me the hotels for the cities with the major festivals in august actually had space but always showed none available because it was in english??? I went to sendai tanabata and went to the 9 hours website directly and there were pods but not on booking…shit haha. Im just going to say they were all booked out since they were major events
The reality is most “English” sections of a website get no traffic. From a webmaster perspective it’s not worth the time and effort to keep it updated when you have enough trouble keeping the Japanese site up to date. It’s just good old fashion business priorities. Look at the Amazon Japan website which probably is one of the higher English traffic website, it’s just a machine translated site off the Japanese one . Even Amazon with almost infinite resources found it makes no sense to maintain an English version of their Japanese website.
That’s opposite of my experience though.
I was staying in Daiwa Roynet and then I realized that I did some error in my booking and missed one night so I need a room otherwise I won’t have anywhere to sleep. I head over to the receptionist and they arranged a room for me (although need to move to a different one).
This is not in Tokyo though, if that matters.
Not just hotels.
I remember a few years ago we were looking for discounts to get tickets to Joypolis and the English site only had SOME of the discounted tickets. If you went to the Japanese one you can see ALL tickets types for better prices.
Obviously this may vary. I’ve seen some sites where their EN/JP are about the same, with likely a google translate on it.
Booking sites in general sometimes buy a block of rooms at a certain hotel and “sell” those. So they’re available only on that website.
Hotels in Japan also tend to reduce their capacity for New Year’s to give their employees some time off. Combined with the increased demand, it’s pretty hard to get bookings.
Didn’t think anyone actually used the English sites. They probably don’t either, which is why it’s not updated
Covid demonstrated how terrible they are at updating tech. Seriously as a shop owner, it is by far the easiest way to inform all your customers of time changes etc. and yet, all shops scribbled a hand written note saying “closed today” – and you’d only find out if you go there.
Or I suppose, make a phone call like a psychopath.
And even if you go to the japanese version, it is such a messy clusterfuck of links and visual pollution that you get transported to the 90s.
It could be japan is terrible with tech, but it’s just resource allocation. As a company are you going to put effort into the English website, that maybe 10% of your customers care about? I discovered a long time ago that English versions of Japanese websites are outdated, and usually missing information. Take Google chrome to the Japanese one or level up your Kanji FTW
You also won’t find the half day ticket for USJ on the english site 😛
In general yes, not just hotels. For whatever websites that have English versions, always assume information are redacted for whatever reasons.
Switch it back to Japanese and so much more details pops out.
Even better, when a hotel is fully booked online, call them anyway and ask them if they have a room available.
It works wonders.
We did that and ended up in the VIP room for the price of a regular room.
They always keep a room open in case a frequent or important guest suddenly needs a place to stay.
We weren’t special, but the room would have gone unused and they could benefit from the unexpected money.
Just use Booking or some other service. Pretty much every hotel is on there now and the rooms are usually cheaper than going directly from the hotel website. It’s a heck of a lot faster than searching for individual hotels too.
But yeah, you’re gonna have a hard time finding a room on New Year’s Eve anyway.
Pro-life tip: Most hotels (in both Japan and abroad) don’t list all their rooms online. You can often get a room in a “booked out” hotel by just arriving at the front desk after check-in time and asking.
The reason for this is that sometimes stuff breaks in hotels, and they need to have some rooms on “standby” to move guests to when the booked room is unavailable.
Now I’m not saying you should rely on this trick, but if you find yourself unexpectedly stranded somewhere (say the train broke down or was stopped because of snow or something) then even if the websites show full occupancy it is often worth just walking into several hotels and asking nicely. I’ve only had this trick fail once, and that was because unexpected snow stranded several trains full of passengers at once, and there were hundreds of people suddenly in need of a hotel room. I ended up having a truly Japanese experience sleeping in a manga cafe.
You can also try the local love hotels, which often have discounted rooms available after midnight. They’re often poorly advertised, but I recommend them. Quality of rooms is highly variable, but in my experience the rooms are bigger and the facilities are better than most regular hotels, and often (somehow) they’re often cheaper than a regular hotel.
To be sure, since girls actively target tourists, but many don’t. The ones that do tend to be rather pricey.
CD ghi
This happens in Japan in all types of online booking and ticketing systems. The English version of the site will say sold out and you go to the Japanese version and it’s very much not sold out
So if you’re booking a hotel room china, or korea, or taiwan, or vietnam, on new year’s eve–or the lunar new year–all those countries will have perfect/functional English website analogues for what they serve up domestically?
How about hotels in the US or Europe–why don’t they have websites in Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc? Maybe americans and europeans are terrible at technology?
This happened to me when I was applying for my studies in one of the universities here in Tokyo. They blamed me for missing an important information about the entrance exam but that said information only existed in the Japanese site because the English site was not up to date. For context, my uni specialises in foreign languages and receives many international students from all over the world, so I’m quite sure I wasn’t the only one who missed critical information simply because we clicked English version
It’s been a few years since I last tried, but there are missing options in the English version of the JP post ATM. I asked the person working for help when trying to send a payment though, he was dumstruck when he saw the lack of options in English. He assumed the English option was exactly the same as the Japanese but just translated into English.
He was kind enough to help me navigate the Japanese menus but I find it funny how many times it feels like the English option is just there so someone, somewhere can say “Look! We have an English version!”. Special mention to the Lawson ATM that had an English option but wouldn’t work through the English options.
Is this why nothing is ever available in ginzan onsen?
Your telling generation who still cling onto Yahoo when it should have gone extinct along with AOL aka dialups.
If you use anything in English it’s automatically going to be shittier in Japan. Look at the 乗り換えapp. It has maybe half the function or less in English. Just use the Japanese version.
The absolute hell that is having a middle name here too 🫠
Or learn Japanese
Recently discovered that as well. Couldn’t figure out why Expedia was showing availability but the (English) hotel page was showing sold out (I wanted to book directly for the membership points).
Solid LPT for moving around in Japan.
I literally just use booking.com.
I was just reserving a hotel near USJ. The English site was all drop down boxes to select the dates. The Japanese site actually had an interactive calendar where I could actually see which dates were on which days.
I guess the English site doesn’t get enough traffic to make it worth their effort. But creating an entirely new (and much worse) codebase for the English site seems like a massive waste of time. I just used the Japanese one since the English version was so bad.