Takayama Ouan

I'm judging this as a Dormy Inn property because that's really what it is. It's similar to their Onyado Nono sub-brand of hotels, but it feels like a cheap imitation. I have no idea why the reviews are so high unless it's because tourists are enamored with the Japanese-style rooms.

==The Room== The room was old and not properly cleaned. The shower floor was quite dirty, there was a mystery stain on the headboard that looked suspiciously like bodily fluid, and we found an empty condom box on the TV stand.

The air conditioner makes a horrible noise, as others have pointed out in their reviews. There was no proper safe but instead a drawer with a key that you have to take with you and hopefully not lose.

Free coffee was available in the lobby, but there was no coffee in the room. Instead, there were two green tea bags and two tiny teacups (maybe 50 ml?) that didn't really accommodate the tea bags.

==The Service== We asked to speak with a male manager and reported the empty condom box mentioned above. We handed it to him, and he simply apologized. He seemed more confused than anything, and didn't offer any compensation for the inconvenience. Something like a free breakfast ticket would've been nice.

Housekeeping doesn't clean the room unless you put the magnetic sign on the door to request it, and no one explained that to us when we checked in. We were surprised when we came back to find that our room had not been tidied and we had to go back to the lobby to request more towels. (They won't bring anything to your room directly. You have to go down and get it yourself.) We later found the explanation of the magnetic sign on a laminated sheet on the coffee table.

At breakfast, one of the cooks (an elderly woman) seemed to become irritated while I was taking some french toast. She started slamming things down and grumbling. I was a bit shocked and forgot to return the spatula to the dish it's meant to sit on, and that made her even angrier. She picked it up from the grill and tossed it onto the dish. I was a bit scared.

The staff seems totally apathetic to the rude behaviour of guests as well, which I'll describe in more detail below. But it seems they don't care if mannerless tourists create chaos and make other guests uncomfortable. We complained about the people in the room above literally running and jumping at midnight, and nothing was resolved.

==Facilities and Amenities== The public bath was decent, but there's no privacy from outside eyes. You can stand on the street, look up, and see people walking around the bathing area nude.

Breakfast was good. There was a wide variety of typical Japanese foods, some speciality local foods, and some Western foods. The coffee was quite bad, though.

==The Guests==

I always thought it was a bit silly to have those posters in the onsen with illustrations and instructions in four languages about how to properly use the onsen, but I wish this hotel had them. Among other bad behaviors, I saw tourists do the following: wash hand towels in the bath water; enter the water with a towel around their waist; enter the bath without washing; put their head under the water; shout in the bathing area; splash and play in the bath; blow their nose off the balcony; and more.

The waiting area for the private baths is supposed to be a quiet lounge where you can read manga and relax, but it's always packed with tourists treating it like a party room. Today I encountered a family loudly eating ice cream and smacking their lips. The parents did nothing while their two sons passed gas repeatedly and laughed about it.

The rude behaviour doesn't stop there. I was shoved more than once at breakfast by people who don't know how to wait in a queue. At one point I was first in line for the elevator and, when it arrived, a random guest tried to push in front of me to board it first.

Japanese people don't seem to stay here. The vast majority were nightmare tourists with absolutely no knowledge of basic cultural etiquette. If you're a resident of Japan, you're going to get frustrated very quickly.