Nagoya Kasadera Hotel

Got a plan with breakfast and dinner. Includes free use of the public bath/hot spring next door, which is connected to the hotel with a long hallway on the second floor. The hot springs and the establishment itself were very very good as well. Dinner was Hida-gyu Hitsumabushi style; very luxurious. Plus free beer as well on my first dinner. The room was okay; a small room but better than most business hotels. Has shuttle service to the train station on a fixed timetable. Considering the price I paid for the whole plan, I consider this quite luxurious!

We picked this hotel because it was the most affordable in Nagoya. Hotel has the basics, and is somewhat comfortable. It is an old building but it is kept clean. Staff is helpful. Small spaces. The area around is limited. There is a couple of local restaurants, a convenience store, and a metro station about a 10 minutes walk. There is no cultural or historical events nearby, only a sports arena. The area around looks industrial.

Unless, like us, you were planning on spending a good portion of your morning at the onsen and had arrived late the previous evening, there is no good reason to stay at this hotel. It's located somewhere that could be anywhere in Japan, with one of those desolate walks from the station that urban Japan does so well, and in other country in the world would freak you out as you go from overpass to underpass in dimly lit streets by the side of a busy highway. It goes without saying that the hotel itself is an eyesore, but then, so is everything else in the vicinity, so I guess it just blends in unobtrusively into the background of steel and concrete brutalism. The staff were polite as are all hotel staff in Japan. The room was like every other business hotel room in Japan: small, functional, vaguely depressing. The bathroom was the usual microscopic moulded plastic affair, with the usual stuff. All impeccably clean. The room was a little noisy, and as there was some kind of university sports club staying when we were there, there was plenty of teenage boys sniggering echoing around the hallways. Breakfast was an above average buffet, though still the bewildering mix of salad, hot dogs and pasta, washed down with a steaming cup of instant coffee was the general prevailing theme. Better than Toyoko Inn breakfasts, but then eating nothing and taking up smoking is better than eating breakfast at Toyoko Inn. Overall, we were left wondering why we bothered with this hotel. It's not actually a spa hotel as we had mistakenly believed, but a hotel next to an onsen (which is actually pretty good, by the way). In summary, there's no good reason to stay here, but the onsen is well worth a day trip.