“Family of 4 w/ 2 teenagers - August 2010”
Nice hotel, well located and easily reachable from the train station with a courtesy minibus travelling every 30mns.
Rooms are spacious, clean and have all amenities; decoration is a bit dated.
Overall hotel are more up to date.
Staff is courteous and helpful.
The hotel is within a short taxi fare of many restaurants and places of interest.
The hotel also arranged bicycle rentals for us and this was a lot of fun and very convenient for temple and shrine hopping.
Note that there are not very restaurants close by the hotel.
Overall, we liked the hotel and would stay there again.
Area recommendations
The ANA has a free minibus pickup from the Kyoto train station every 30mns by the MacDonald, on the back side of the station. The hotel is well located, clean and welcoming. Staff is attentive and friendly. The rooms are a bit dated but otherwise fairly roomy, have the necessary amenities and are very clean.
For a city like Kyoto which is probably the first destination of foreigners visiting Japan,
there could be a greater effort to translate services in English.
Example:
- the restaurants in the lower level have menus available by the entrance - in Japanese only.
- there was a beer garden on the roof but the sign indicating 'Beer Garden' gave no other details
in Engish.
When to go
April-June or Sep-Oct are likely best months.
July and August are hot and humid.
Getting there
Train from Osaka takes just over 1 hour.
Dining
Only 2-3 restaurants are close enough to walk to; The rest require taxis but a great deal of restaurants
are within a Y1000 taxi fare. KushiKura is a nice Yakitori place about 10mns walking. Very Japanese, friendly
but busy - reservations are advised. The hotel can help with that.
We had breakfast at the hotel and recommend the buffet over ordering from the menu.
