About SiftStays

Each guide states its own rule in its questions section. There are three kinds:

• Station guides group hotels by the station each one publishes a walk from. Ginza, Shibuya and Namba & Shinsaibashi take hotels whose own published access is a walk of ten minutes or less to the area's stations, or a direct connection; Shinjuku's guide explains its own mix of Trip.com's area listing and hotels chosen by name. No hotel is in a guide for its name alone.
• Area guides (Tokyo Station, Ueno & Asakusa, Shinagawa, Suidobashi) take the hotels Trip.com groups under that area, each opened and checked one by one.
• Theme-park guides start from the park operator's own list of partner hotels — Tokyo Disney Resort's and Universal Studios Japan's.

A hotel's name, photograph, star class, guest score, review count and address come from its Trip.com listing, and so does the booking link.

Everything about getting there — the walk to a station, a shuttle, a train route, a room size — comes from the operator's own publication: the hotel's website (or, where its site states none or cannot be read, the access text the hotel itself supplied to a booking site, labelled as such), the railway or subway company, the airport, or the park. Each of those figures is shown with its source, a link to it and the date it was read, on the hotel's card or in the page's source list.

When no source states something, the page says so instead of estimating it. A walking time nobody published is left blank, not worked out from a map.

• No prices. Rates change by the day; the booking partner shows the current one.
• No reviews or ratings of our own. Guest scores are Trip.com's, shown with their review counts.
• No rankings and no “best” lists. Where a guide orders hotels, it says by what.
• No first-hand stay reports, and no paid placements.

Every figure carries the date it was read, and scores, rooms and services change after that date. Check the details with the hotel or the booking partner before you book.

Booking links go to Trip.com, and SiftStays may earn a commission when a stay is booked through them, at no extra cost to you. A hotel needs a Trip.com listing to appear, because that listing is the source for its details; beyond that, the rules above decide which hotels are in a guide. See the affiliate disclosure.

If a figure here no longer matches its source, a source has changed, or something on a page is unclear, write to siftstays@gmail.com with the page and the figure you mean.