Hotel Kinu in Nikko

We took a random trip to an onsen town (Kinugawa). It is high season and a busy time to travel, but my partner and I were fairly confident that we would be able to find a place to crash for the night and still have a nice time. We were mostly right but this place was not part of “what went well”.

We picked this place because it had an onsen itself that we were planning to use in the morning. But right when you’re needing to take a bath and get ready to check out, they very unapologetically close the onsen. So we went back to our room, defeated, and packed our stuff. Getting ready to leave, we got a call from the front desk, reminding us that we are 10 minutes late for checkout, which was unreasonably early at 10 AM. At about 1015 we got down to the Front Desk, checked out, and went and had one of their complementary coffees in the lobby. After sitting down and having a coffee, searching for an onsen that we could go to since we couldn’t go to the one at the hotel, we were briefly scolded by the Front Desk woman for drinking their complementary coffee after checkout. After apologizing for such an egregious error, we sat and continue our planning. About 10 minutes later, the same woman at the front desk asked us to leave because we were enjoying hotel amenities after checkout. There were, by the way, no other people in the lobby. I wonder why… 

Don’t go here. They don’t deserve your patronage or your money. They need to learn how to treat people better before they get better foot traffic.