Kanazawa "At Home at Ryokan Service"
New Q&A: How do I choose the hotel?
November 30th, 2009
The decision, should be based primarily on your budget. Depending on the available money you can choose hotels more or less suitable to our needs. Generally, the more money you have available and the better the treatment, but for relatively low quantity (maximum 100 euros per night per person) the the cost dependence is not always automatic.
Besides the budget, there is something very important that you always must to consider:
when you switch hotel you have to carry with you a quantity of often cumbersome of luggages, so, if possible it’s best to not change hotels several times in your period of stay,
furthermore below there are the factors to consider when choosing the hotel:
1 - Distance from the train stations that lead directly to the international airport: You should choose an accommodation that can be reached quickly once you arrive in Japan with the aircraft and that allow access to the airport quickly after the holiday is over.
2 – Proximity and accessibility of places to visit: You should choose a hotel located in an area from where you can easily and quickly reach the places you chosen to visit. For example, if you have to visit Kyoto, Nara, Kobe, Himeji, Osaka, choosing the hotel in Osaka you are able to get to other places in a very short time.
3 - Type of hotel: in Japan there are two main styles of hotel, the traditional ones called Ryokan and Western-style we all know(I suggest you a “business hotel” that is cheap but very confortable). For this choice all depends on personal taste. Note that usually in the case of traditional hotel, also meals are of traditional kind, so if you have problems with this kind of food, make sure you are provided with what that you need (for example sending an email to the hotel before booking).
Alternative Solutions are:
- Staying in a temple (Temple lodging or Shukubo): Some temples give (not free) hospitality to a limited number of people. You have to consider in this case that the style of life that you should keep, must be in line with a religious environment.
- Staying in a Minshuku: these are private houses in traditional style. Basically you are going to live with a Japanese family.
4 - Hotel rating: once chosen a group of possible hotels, you should conduct an audit of the level of appreciation of that hotel from other people who stayed there. For this purpose you can make a search with a general search engine like Google, or use one of the sites like Tripadvisor http://www.tripadvisor.com/ that contains reviews of many tourists in the world.
5- A fast internet connection available for free: to call your country using Skype.
To view the available hotels in various parts of Japan you can use the following websites (and Google maps):
http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/arrange/accomodations/index.html : site of the Japan National Tourism Organization
http://www.japaneseguesthouses.com/index.htm : site for traditional hotels
http://www.minshuku.jp/ : to find Minshuku in Japan
http://templelodging.com/index.html :to stay in a temple
Finally, each city, usually has a site with cooperatives of local hotels such as Kanazawa:
http://www.yadotime.jp/english/