How can I discover what time of the year hotels will be cheapest for a given...

cafe_carl

I'm interested in visiting Tokyo in 2015, and am trying to figure out what time(s) of the year will likely be cheapest for hotel stays, since it is a notoriously expensive city. Short of using a hotel search such as hotels.com , and laboriously going through each week/month of the year, is there a quicker way? Assume I want to constrain it to hotels of at least a reasonable luxury level (3*+). I'd like to base this on actual costs from a search...

Originally asked by Andrew Ferrier on Stack Exchange (travel) (CC BY-SA 3.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Hotel pricing in Japan is generally highly seasonal , and many hotels go so far as to publish a "room rate calendar" (客室料金カレンダー) that shows exactly how prices vary through the year. Disney has a nice, clear text-based one , but I'll use this rather more typical image from the Resonate chain in Kyushu to illustrate: To parse that, 月 means month (6月 = June, 7月 = July, etc), and prices are ranked by color so that yellow (priciest) > green > light pink > orange > dark blue > dark pink > light blue > cyan (cheapest); and no, that order doesn't make a whole lot of sense. (Adding in letter codes, eg. A to E , is pretty common too.) A few trends are clear: August is the most expensive month,...

Full answer by lambshaanxy: https://travel.stackexchange.com/a/40244 (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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