Finding a hotel room in central Tokyo has always been a challenge, especially with the incredible growth in inbound tourism in recent years.

Finding a hotel room in central Tokyo during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – could be harder than getting a ticket to an Olympic event, according to this Asahi News article.

N-Star, an evening news program on TBS, gave a breakdown of room availability in Tokyo and the surrounding prefectures on their Monday, July 15 broadcast. They reported that 46,000 hotel rooms in Tokyo have already been reserved by the IOC, sports federations and national Olympic committee members.

That’s 46,000 out of approximately 300,000 hotel rooms available in the Tokyo area, and that doesn’t include the rooms that are likely being set aside for Olympic sponsors, media and various other Olympic-related organizations.

For example, all 830 rooms in the Tokyo Bay Ariake Washington Hotel in Odaiba, where the media center will be located, are all reserved during the weeks of the Tokyo Olympics, and thus currently unavailable to the public.

There is an intent to release rooms to the public in the Fall, as the IOC and the various other organizations firm up the number of rooms they will actually need. But right now, it’s hard to find rooms to reserve now. N Star did a survey, looking at the prefectures surrounding Tokyo: Kanagawa, Chiba, and Saitama:

• Kanagawa: There is, apparently, a luxury hotel in front of Kawasaki Station in Kanagawa prefecture, which is about 20 minutes from Tokyo Station by train, where you can  reserve rooms during the Tokyo2020 Games. The most expensive hotel listed on Google Maps is the Kawasaki Nikko Hotel.
• Chiba: A business hotel near Makuhari Hongo Station in Chiba prefecture, which is about 40 minutes from Tokyo Station, is reported to start taking reservations from August. No, I couldn’t figure out the name of the place.
• Saitama: N Star looked at larger cities in Saitama like Kawaguchi, Urawa and Oomiya, only to come up in empty. Apparently, you  have to go out as far as 50 minutes away as Kasukabe. They found a Japanese-style business hotel where you can reserve now.

N Star did provide recommendations for the flexible traveler:

• Guest Houses: these are commonly frequented by non-Japanese, which they said would be good for Japanese who like these kind of inter-cultural interactions. Here is a link to Booking.com’s “10 Best Guest Houses in Tokyo.”
• Capsule Hotels: TKP is a chain of capsule hotel they identified, which has a First Cabin brand. I stayed at one in Haneda Airport, which is reasonably priced and spotlessly clean. The picture they showed was much bigger than the traditional capsule hotel room, which is literally a space for a person to lay down, not to stand. Here is a link to Booking.com’s “10 Best Capsule Hotels in Tokyo.”
• Leisure Hotel (Love Hotel): Love hotels, which you see scattered throughout Tokyo for their short-stay offerings, are traditionally for couples who are looking for a discreet place to commune. But with the demand for rooms so high in Tokyo, Love Hotels are a very real option for visitors and tourists seeking a clean, inexpensive place to stay. These accomodations are plentiful, often near train stations, and as the broadcast emphasized, are being marketed as clean, safe rooms for single women. Here is a link to Booking.com’s “10 Best Love Hotel’s in Tokyo.”

One option not provided in the N Star broadcast was Airbnb, which is just beginning to recover in Japan after a change in laws that put controls on people who wanted to lease rooms on the Airbnb platform. In a search for the week of July 22-29, 2020 in Tokyo, you can find a range of offerings from about JPY6,000 to JPY437,000 a night.

If you are lucky enough to snag tickets at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, you still need to have a place to stay. Happy hunting!