Prince Hotels
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Native name
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プリンスホテル Purinsu Hoteru |
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| Industry | Hotels |
| Headquarters | 3-1-5 Higashi Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo, Japan |
| Parent | Seibu Holdings, Inc. |
| Website | www |
The Prince Hotels (プリンスホテル Purinsu Hoteru?) is the name of a hotel chain company headquartered in Toshima-ku, Tokyo, Japan. It is a subsidiary of Seibu Holdings, Inc. Together with Seibu Railway, Prince Hotels is the core company of Seibu Group.
During the Allied occupation of Japan following World War II, many members of the Japanese peerage lost their titles and were subject to crippling taxation on their real estate holdings. Yasujirō Tsutsumi, who controlled the Seibu Railway through the Kokudo Corporation, arranged to buy several of these families' properties at a discount and used them to develop hotels. The first of these hotels, the Grand Prince Hotel Takanawa, opened in 1953 on the site of the Takeda-no-miya residence. The Tokyo Prince Hotel opened in 1964 on a site that originally housed graves of several Tokugawa family shoguns, whose bodies were moved to the neighboring temple of Zojo-ji.
Originally, hotels branded as Prince Hotels were not wholly owned by Prince Hotels Company, but were instead operated by different companies, such as Seibu Railway, Kokudo, or Izuhakone Railway. The management system of Prince Hotels was described as "debt operation" by the media. It borrowed funds from banks, developed land using the funds, and borrowed more funds with the growth of land values. The system worked in the 1960s with Japanese economic growth, until the 1990s when the bubble economy burst.
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Wikipedia