Deciding between Marriotts budget options in Tokyo? The Four Points Flex and Moxy Kinshicho are Marriotts more accessible hotels in Japan’s capital. So which one should you book” The short version is that the Moxy Tokyo Kinshicho is the better hotel, while the Four Points Flex can be the better deal. If the prices are similar, I’d take the Moxy. If the Flex is significantly cheaper, in a better location for what you’re doing, or you just need somewhere clean to sleep, the decision gets much closer. And, if you’re interested in Tokyo Disneyland, the Sheraton Grande might actually be your best option. Let’s dive in:
The price difference
Rates in Tokyo vary wildly, but the Flex can be dramatically cheaper. On dates I checked, the Moxy was about USD $140-220 (sometimes much more) while the flex was $70-$130. That is important because the Four Points Flex is not simply a slightly worse Moxy. At the right price, it is almost a different category of hotel.
Four Points Flex Higashi Kanda
I stayed at the Four Points Flex in Higashi Kanda. Higashi Kanda was a sort of nondescript neighborhood, but it has the advantage of good transportation connections, making it a great first or last night stay in Tokyo if you are arriving late or leaving very early.
There are currently three Four Points Flex hotels in Tokyo proper: Ueno, Higashi Kanda and Shibuya West. Ueno is probably the best location for a normal tourist. Higashi Kanda is arguably the most practical, while Shibuya West is slightly misleadingly named—it is near Ikejiri-Ohashi Station rather than directly beside Shibuya Station.
No matter how big your budget is, it is nice to wake up where you want to be. The Four Points Flex does give you the option of staying in multiple places across Tokyo, and waking up near where you want to be.
None of them really occupy Tokyo’s most desirable hotel addresses. That is presumably part of how the concept works. They are more like second-row locations: close enough to somewhere useful, without paying to sleep directly in Ginza or Shibuya. Ueno is probably the exception. Ueno itself is somewhere a tourist could reasonably choose to stay, with Ueno Park, museums, Ameyoko and an extremely useful train station nearby. If I were recommending one Flex to a first-time Tokyo visitor, I’d probably start there.
The Four Points Flex room
The room is genuinely tiny. A standard room at Higashi Kanda was around 10–11 square meters, compared with around 17 square meters at the Moxy. That doesn’t sound enormous on paper, but the Moxy gives you roughly 60–70% more room. In Tokyo, you notice it.
The Flex is nevertheless surprisingly functional, with a small refrigerator, kettle and actual worktable. The Four Points Flex has free coffee and ice in the lobby cafe, as well as a large portion of free self serve amenities like toothbrushes and soap.
The Four Points Flex also has a bread bar, from 9 AM, which kind of doesn’t make sense as that’s late for breakfast—but anyway. The Flex also had a self service area with cheap sodas and very affordable alcohol, which was kind of surprising. Also, I want to note that the Four Points Flex gave me a birthday card, as I was there on my birthday, which was a nice touch. There is a weirdly pleasant practicality to the Flex. It doesn’t try to convince you that the lobby is a lifestyle destination. It gives you coffee, toiletries, cheap drinks and somewhere clean to sleep–and that’s about it.
I got into my Four Points Flex room quite late, and heard a couple next door talking past midnight. That suggests the walls are thin.
I’d probably bring earplugs if you’re a light sleeper.
The Four Points Flex is sterile and boring, but clean and nice. This cannot be emphasized enough. In the old days, you’d go to cheap hotels and wonder if they were clean or safe. We are lucky that places like the Four Points Flex exist, where things feel clean and nice.
It is boring in an extremely reassuring way. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it, but also basically nothing luxurious about it either. But you’re not buying luxury, you’re buying convenience and cleanliness at an affordable price.
Moxy Tokyo Kinshicho
The Four Points Flex chain is boring but functional and nice in its own way. The Moxy, however, is anything but boring. It is intentionally trying to not be boring. The Moxy is a fun hotel where the bar is also the check-in desk. The whole hotel has a sort of risqué theme, in a very mild sense, with big lips on the entrance, and a currency conversion machine that asks you to “use me”. This is funny sort of, because of the area the hotel is in.
I think the branding is just playful, but I suppose the top 1% most prudish people will not like it.
Although Kinshicho is supposedly a red-light district, I think this is one of the few cases where being a foreigner is a huge advantage. Men in suits on the street, who are apparently touts for bars, never talked to me. Even though I was a single male walking back to the hotel, it was as if I didn’t exist. I didn’t feel threatened at all. I was just 100% ignored.
Kinshicho genuinely does have an adult-entertainment and nightlife district, particularly south of the station, but calling it a “red-light district” gives a Westerner a slightly misleading mental picture.
There are hostess clubs, girls bars and adult businesses, but much of what you actually see is an enormous collection of bars in anonymous-looking buildings. There are no women walking around in Bikinis, and no glass windows with neon lights a la Amsterdam.
Unless you know what the Japanese signs mean, you could walk straight through the area without realizing what some of the businesses actually were.
From a few nights staying there, I think you could take a 10 year old around with you and they’d have no idea the area had a reputation.
The Moxy room
The Moxy has bigger rooms, a true breakfast buffet (cheap but not free for Platinum members), a laundry area, and a large lounge-ish area to relax at the entrance to the hotel.
The bigger room matters. Neither hotel is luxurious, but the Moxy feels substantially less like you have rented a box purely for sleeping.
The Moxy technically has a refrigerator, although it is a tiny unit mounted into the wall that can hold maybe four bottles of Coca-Cola. It works, but you are not stocking it with groceries.
The rooms otherwise lean heavily into the Moxy concept, with foldable furniture and wall storage. It’s clever, but the room almost assumes that if you really want to work or hang out, you’ll go downstairs.
It’s never a good sign when the hotel gives out free earplugs at the reception, but for my room on the eighth floor, it was pretty quiet.
Scroll through the gallery above to see some breakfast options at the Moxy
Breakfast and the Moxy vibe
The Breakfast at the Moxy is actually genuinely good, although it is not luxurious. It’s better than it should be given the price of the hotel. There is no barista service which is a shame, but the self serve machine is fine, and there are pots of coffee available.
Soy milk is available if you ask for it, which is unusual but fine I guess. I appreciated that they had vegan chicken as a protein option. The Miso Soup was nice on a rainy day, and classic stuff like cereal and eggs and bacon was available.
The lunch and dinner menu at the Moxy also looked genuinely nice, though I didn’t eat at the hotel aside from breakfast.
The Moxy overall feels like a very millennial hotel. It’s a place that would have felt insane in 2015, or whenever the idea came up. It reminds me of the iPhone 6 era, when social media was coming up. The idea of having a bar be the hotel checkin would’ve been ultra cool.
I’m not saying the Moxy is dated, because it’s not dated. But it is a very specific vibe.
The Moxy is like, a cool place to hang out if you are in your early twenties, or if you’re a digital nomad. The entry way lounge is genuinely pretty good.
Even if you don’t care about the vibe, the lounge is useful. If you need to edit photos, work on your laptop or kill two hours before going somewhere, I’d much rather do it at the Moxy.
The weird thing is that the Moxy gives you a substantially bigger room and then also gives you much better common space. The Flex gives you a tiny room and basically tells you to go experience Tokyo. Maybe that is not actually a bad philosophy for a budget Tokyo hotel.
One other cheap Marriott option: Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay
During my trip, the only other Marriott I regularly found for under $200 a night was the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay. On paper, it is by far the most hotel for your money: this is a huge, full-service, family-friendly resort with substantially more space and facilities than either the Moxy or Flex. The catch is that it is at Tokyo Disney Resort rather than in central Tokyo.
If you want Disneyland, have kids, or simply want something resembling the amount of space you’d expect from a Western hotel, the Sheraton is actually a pretty compelling option. And it is not quite as isolated as the map makes it look. You can take the Disney Resort Line or hotel shuttle to Maihama Station, and from Maihama it is only around 15–20 minutes direct to Tokyo Station. Door to door obviously takes longer, but it is not insane.
The geography is also good if you’re flying out of Haneda. The Sheraton is only about 22 kilometers from the airport across Tokyo Bay, so by car it can be convenient. The problem is price: Uber quoted me about $99 for the trip. So it is physically close to Haneda without necessarily being cheaply close to Haneda.
The Breakfast at the Sheraton is just miles better than the Moxy too, even though the Moxy’s breakfast was not bad. One niggle– it was hard to get Barista made coffee at a lower end Marriott hotel in Japan. I suppose it makes sense given the machines are good, but the Sheraton Grand Sydney has Barista coffee, so I expected it at least there. Anyway, it was still a nice hotel.
If you want a resort, are going to Disney, or value space more than being able to walk outside into central Tokyo, it deserves to be in the conversation. And you could just do all three. In my most recent trip I did just that, with one cheap night arriving late at the Flex, before moving to the Moxy for most of the trip, and ending with two days at the Sheraton, with a brief Disney visit squeezed in. And if you do think you might go to Disney, remember that the Sheraton has its own allocation of tickets, and you still get a paper one as a souvenir, so it pays to go to the hotel.
The points game:
For travelers playing the points game, the major issue with the Four Points Flex series of hotels is that they earn only half an Elite Night Credit. So, if you stay there for 10 days, you’re only credited for five.
Apparently, you used to have to stay two nights to get a single night, or you got nothing, but this has been upgraded to now allowing you to get .5 nights for staying a single night. (I know this because there was a poster on the wall of the elevator noting this change).
Anyway, that was a major negative for me since I was chasing Titanium Elite when I stayed there.
The Flex also earns fewer Bonvoy points per dollar than most full-service Marriott brands. If you’re trying to hit Platinum, Titanium or an Annual Choice Benefit, that changes the math.
Moxy vs Four Points Flex: Which should you book?
The Moxy is the superior hotel, but the Flex wins if you want a different location or are hitting the pavement all day and only use the room as a place to crash.
If they were exactly the same price, I would choose the Moxy (or the Sheraton Grande) almost every time. You get considerably more space, a proper breakfast buffet, somewhere comfortable to hang out, laundry facilities and the normal Marriott Elite Night Credit.
But they often are not the same price. If the Flex is substantially cheaper and you’re leaving at 8 AM and coming back at midnight, paying much more for a cool lobby you never use is pointless.
Overall, if I had to choose one hotel to stay in for an entire Tokyo trip, between the two, I’d go for the Moxy. But I wouldn’t be afraid to do an entire Tokyo trip in the Four Points Flex, as long as you understand the hotel as a place to sleep, rather than a place to hang out.
The Moxy is nice enough to hang out in, or work in for a few hours, although Tokyo is so great it would be a mistake to spend too much time just hanging at the hotel.
For me, that is really the difference. The Moxy, or the Sheraton Grande, are hotels you can enjoy staying in. The Four Points Flex is a hotel you can use. In Tokyo, depending on what each one costs that night, either one can be the smarter choice.
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