The place where tourist scams and rip-offs don’t exist

The Palace Hotel Tokyo has all the facilities you would expect from a luxury, five-star hotel.

There are eight very good restaurants on site; four bars, including Royal Bar, one of my favourite purveyors of fine cocktails in the city, if not the world. There’s a high-end pastry shop. There are artisanal craft stores. There’s a spa, a club lounge, and a restaurant beside the Imperial Palace moat that serves one of the world’s great breakfasts.

The Palace Hotel Tokyo is one of the world’s fanciest hotels.

But then, there’s also something you might not expect: a 7-Eleven. A humble old convenience store.

Head to the basement level of one of the world’s most prestigious hotels and you can pick up a can of Sapporo beer for about $2, and maybe a “tamago-sando”, or egg sandwich, for about the same again, and a perhaps a chestnut Mont Blanc to round out your bill at something like $6.

Amazing. Though, maybe the most unusual thing is that this is not unusual in Tokyo, or throughout Japan, at all. The Keio Plaza, over in Shinjuku, also has a convenience store on site. Many luxury hotels do.

It means no more getting stiffed $20 for a mini-bar drink if you don’t feel like it. No more heart attacks over the bill for your dodgy room service if that’s not the mood you’re in. You can just press a button in the lift, go down to the basement, grab everything you need for a couple of bucks and then head back up to your room.

Even in the most expensive hotels, you’re never far from a cheap beer in Japan.Credit: iStock

If only the rest of the world was like that. Because this isn’t even limited to the top end of hotels in Japan. Accommodation providers from all levels will often stock their hotels with vending machines selling cheap drinks and snacks. There’s no culture here of taking advantage of the guests trapped in your confines with overpriced sales; instead, you serve them what they require: cheap beer and tasty snacks.

Hotel mini-bars are an outrageous rip-off, everyone understands that. It’s a thing you just have to put up with when you travel, a facility you only use in an emergency. But not in Japan.

And this, I think, is representative of something so many visitors love about Japan, and one of the reasons it’s so popular as a destination: there’s no culture of taking advantage of tourists. There’s no culture of the rip-off.

All those old travel cliches, those scams and annoyances and outrageous rip-offs to look out for, just don’t exist in Japan.

In Japan, the price on the menu is the price you pay.Credit: Alamy

Taxi drivers will never take you on the scenic route. If you get in a taxi in Japan, if the driver presses the button and the door swings open and you get inside and tell them where you are going, you will be taken there, on the most efficient route.

You won’t get the detour to a carpet store or a jewellery shop or suddenly discover that the fare quoted to you was actually for one person and there’s two of you so hey, now it’s double.

You don’t have to tip in Japan. In fact, there is no tipping in Japan, at all. You don’t have to worry that you haven’t tipped enough for your meal, or that you’ve thrown in too much, or that you’re being taken advantage of or unfairly pressured.

Here is the bill, and that is the exact amount you pay. Done. Finished.

There’s no dynamic pricing on train tickets in Japan, so again, you don’t have to worry that you’re paying too much. The price is the price. Book it whenever you like, it will always be the same.

You would have to be extremely unlucky to be intentionally short-changed in Japan. Shopkeepers won’t slip you a 1000-yen ($10) note instead of a 10,000 and hope you won’t notice. People won’t approach you on the street and try to trick you out of some of your hard-earned with some elaborate ruse.

This isn’t to say that everything is necessarily cheap in Japan. Some meals there will cost you a lot of money. Hotel prices, in particular in Tokyo, can be astronomical. And those hassle-free taxi rides are not exactly a bargain.

But you know all this before you go. You can plan for it, budget for it. And when you arrive you can just relax and pay the amounts you thought you were going to have to pay, and head down to the 7-Eleven for your early-evening refreshment instead of holding your nose and digging into the hotel mini-bar.

This shouldn’t be so rare, but it is. To travel in the rest of the world is to be on your guard, to be thinking constantly about whether you’re getting the tourist price or the local price, whether you’re paying too much or being taken advantage of, how you can mitigate that, what you can now afford.

But not in Japan. And that is surely worth toasting with a $2 Sapporo and a view of the palace.