Le Meridien Opens Hotel In Tokyo Business District

<B> Le Meridien Opens Hotel In Tokyo Business District</B>

By Judy Jacobs

Le Meridien Grand Pacific, Tokyo's newest international hotel, is set to open June 1 in Rainbow Town, the Japanese capital's newest business district.

The 30-story property will offer 884 guest rooms, including 60 Club President executive rooms on two floors.

Four business suites each will combine a guest room with a small meeting room.

Food and beverage outlets will include two Japanese, a French, an Italian and a Chinese restaurant, a sake bar, karaoke rooms and a sky lounge. The property will have a grand ballroom that can accommodate 1,650 attendees banquet style and 17 meeting rooms.

Rainbow Town--an artificial island located in Tokyo Harbor and connected to the mainland by Rainbow Bridge, a spectacular bi-level suspension bridge--is the latest appellation for an area that traditionally has been called Daiba.

Daiba, meaning fort in Japanese, pays tribute to the seven bulwarks built in 1853 offshore from Edo, as Tokyo was then known, to ward off invading Western ships. Two of the forts still stand on tiny islands in the harbor.

In 1989, the Tokyo metropolitan government announced the creation of Tokyo Teleport Town, a new business district that gradually came to be known as Rainbow Town, thanks to the bridge.

Today, Rainbow Town includes the headquarters of Fuji Television, the Telecom Center and Tokyo International Exhibition Center, identified by its nickname, "Big Sight." Like the other buildings of Rainbow Town, the exhibition center, Japan's largest, distinguishes itself architecturally by its surrealistic space age appearance. Big Sight offers 10 exhibition halls, a convention hall and 17 conference rooms.

"Most of the people staying at the Le Meridien Pacific will be attendees for exhibitions at Big Sight," according to Yuichi Yonemori, director of marketing for the hotel's Los Angeles office. If the clientele of the neighboring Hotel Nikko Tokyo Bay is any indication, business travelers also will be a large part of the market.

The two hotels are connected to Shinbashi Station in downtown Tokyo by the monorail called Waterfront New Transit System Yurikamome, one of Tokyo's newest transportation lines.

Rainbow Town is not as crowded as central Tokyo, is easy to get to and provides a new experience for those who have been to the city before.

To celebrate its opening, the Grand Pacific has launched the Premium Lodging Plan, a package offering 50 percent off the regular rack rates for a two-night stay between June 1 and July 17. The discount applies to all but the very top suites.