Originally Posted by
RTW1
I cannot stop laughing about all these comments on the location of the GH....
What people seem to ignore is that the location is good for getting on the subway and that is something that is required if you want to see the sights. Things are spread out a bit. Lots of tourist locations are also within walking distance and if you walk the other way (not to 101) it takes you about 5 minutes to see the "real" Taipei, whatever that is.
I'm glad I could make you laugh but let's try to give the OP sound advice. First of all, you'd be hard-pressed to find a place within central Taipei less than good for getting on the "subway," so the same can be said about pretty much any other hotel. A better differentiating factor then is what can you do in the area without resorting to the MRT.
If it were my trip, I would want to see what makes the place I'm visiting different and special compared to anywhere else in the world. For Taipei, that would be: narrow residential lanes full of four-storey buildings overlaid with greenery, shophouses with shadowy public arcades and peculiar items for sale, rich religious life with temples large and small as well as streetside altars where offerings to gods are placed and incense sticks or ghost money is burned, itinerant food vendors with their vibrant and cleverly-decorated carts, myriads of scooters swerving and moving around chaotically or parked in seemingly endless rows.
All of the above is absent from the Xinyi Planned Area, which might make it a great place to live as an expat but arguably not where you want to end up spending most of your time as a tourist.
For comparison, the pedestrianized area in Ximending is also a bustling shopping district very lively into the night, however the shops there are not necessarily international brands but one-of-a-kind local ones, there is an abundance of street food, and it's also a walking distance to many of the sights such as the city gates, Longshan Temple, Presidential Palace or CKS Memorial Hall, which are concentrated in the older, western parts of Taipei. In the evening, you can also attend a traditional Chinese music concert at the Zhongshan Hall or the National Concert Hall or, and it'll be within walking distance too.
The Hyatt is the most obvious choice for the OP, and he could do worse than stay there, but it's important to realize that none of the three hotels are strategically located for the tourists, and the reason they are where they are is for business travellers to the central government offices (Sheraton), trade fairs (Hyatt), or the Neihu technology park (Mariott). As a tourist ideally you'd want to be somewhere else, where you don't have to take MRT the first thing you get out of the hotel. (This is mainly for other readers researching this topic later, as they will not have the same constraints.)
Hope the OP has a great trip.