About
Where We Check In is a hotel research site. We read the listings, the maps and the reviews so you don’t have to open fourteen tabs before booking a room.
What this site is
Every post here answers one booking question — where to stay in a neighbourhood, which hotels are actually close to a station, whether a transit pass pays for itself. The format is always the same: a short answer at the top, a comparison table, then the reasoning.
We start with Tokyo. The plan is to go deep on one city before adding another, because a site that covers forty cities badly is worth less than one that covers a single city properly.
What this site is not
We have not stayed in the hotels we write about. That’s the honest position, and we’d rather state it on the About page than bury it.
So we don’t write sentences like "we woke up to the view over the park." We can’t, and inventing one would be a lie you’d catch eventually. What we do instead is measurable work: pull the coordinates, calculate the distance, read a few hundred recent reviews, find the pattern, and say plainly what we found — including the bad parts.
A blogger who visited once in 2019 has a memory and stale prices. We have current data and no memory. Those are different products. Ours is more useful for the specific job of choosing a room.
If you want to know exactly how a post gets made, we wrote that up: How We Research.
How we pay for it
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you book through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
That arrangement changes nothing about what we recommend. Three rules keep it honest:
- Every post names at least one drawback. If a hotel has a recurring complaint in its reviews, it goes in the post, whatever the commission looks like.
- We don’t rank by payout. Rankings come from ratings, review volume and distance. We don’t check commission rates before writing.
- No affiliate link without a reason to recommend. If we can’t say why a place is a pick, it isn’t one.
Every post with affiliate links carries a disclosure line above the fold.
Who runs it
Where We Check In is written and maintained by the Where We Check In team.
Corrections are welcome and we act on them. If something here is wrong or out of date, contact us — we’ll fix it and note the date on the post.