Originally Posted by
jpatokal
So Osaka is sorted -- turns out St. Regis is doing
a promo until Jan 26 for bookings until the end of May offering rooms from a scarcely credible Y19,000 for two, including breakfast.
(Add Y2000 on weekends, rooms limited, etc.) Even more surprisingly, this doesn't even seem to be all
that great a rate, there's a whole slew of just-above-Y20000 plans on their website. Given that this is about a third of what you'd pay in Tokyo for the same class of hotel, whoever decided to build a St. Regis in Osaka must be contemplating seppuku...
Alas, it doesn't quite work that way. We're too small a company to get much in the way of corporate rates, and "scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours" deals for free accommodation are
very much frowned upon. Now occasionally there are friend-of-a-friend things where a colleague knows somebody, which is eg. how I used to get F&F rates at Fairmont Singapore, but there are none that I know of for Japan. So that's why I'm trawling for deals on FT...
That is great for the St. Regis and the room size is quite large too.^ Thing about Osaka and West is that they are more than willing to do a deal.......not so much in the big smoke (as you know). I did look at the Pen website and they do have a Tokyo style deal for 40,000JPY+ where they will give you a 10,000 Yen coupon to use in the hotel restaurants and also "Yankee" breakfast included and a 1 category room upgrade. I wasn't in Tokyo long enough, but I always had the impression that they would rather give gifts etc. instead of giving discounted prices. Of course that was just my impression....