The hotel’s photos looked good, but upon arrival, we were disappointed. The room smelled of mold and the bedroom carpet was so full of stains that we felt uncomfortable and decided to sleep in the tatami room instead. It was also slightly quieter in there. In the normal bedroom you could hear everything from the outside.

The armchairs were filthy, as was most everything (although at least the toilet and bathroom were alright), so we didn’t feel like touching anything in the room. The handwashing sink’s tap was missing the warm water handle, so we couldn’t get warm water. We also didn’t understand the floor plan at all. It felt more like an office, or maybe a cheap hostel, rather than a hotel. Our room had a long corridor and what I can only describe as a… waiting room?

The balcony of the room continued all the way to a co-working space nearby, so if anyone would have wanted to stare into our room, they could have done that. In fact, the entire side building that the co-working space and our room was in, smelled like vomit and looked like it hadn’t been renovated since shouwa. It had a creepy air to it.

The onsen was good, but apart from that we felt slightly uncomfortable with everything. When we went to check the room explanations on the website again to understand how we ended up booking something so bad, we noticed that all the rooms had photos, except the one we had. I understand why.

The room was called the Annex Shirasuna Garden sum + Western-style, and apparently it’s ”the only room combining Japanese and Western rooms”. So maybe we just had bad luck and other room types would have been better. However our room was not the only one in the side building and having seen the corridors, I don’t have high hopes for the other rooms either.

We might come to Shirahama again, because the city was nice, but we won’t be staying in this hotel a second time.