Hotel Aizuwakamatsu dengan Spa

We visited Aizuwakamatsu at the national holiday weekend so there were limited options to us in this famous onsen town, Hagishiyama. We wanted a more modern hotel, and while the shots of the room look good on their website, the reality is that it is much smaller than I had expected. Though the room looked new, the bathroom was a disappointment, small and shabby. With two large beds in the room, that leaves little space for moving around. And they try hard to squeeze all essential items of an onsen hotel room into the smallest space possible, including placing the vanity unit in the living room opposite the sleeping platform, sharing space with a kettle and drinking water glasses. There is a shoe stand and a folding screen in-between the toilet and bathroom, which is hugely strange and inconvenient. Ours is a 12-tatami room, which I expect would be good for 3 people, but the reality is that it is so cramped that one would not want to spend much time in the room. Perhaps that’s the reason why the hotel provided a lot of public sitting areas. Yes, for guests to admire the magnificent view of the mountain stream, but also to stay out of the uncomfortable room. The room was a huge disappointment but there are some nice sides of the hotel. Dinner was really good; we had window seats facing the waterfall and the Aizu beef was very delicious. The public onsets, especially the outdoor ones, are nice, situated just next to the mountain stream. All in all, for the US680 I paid for three, it was not good value for money.