Rakuten STAY Atami — Hotel in Atami

Overall: Amenities are great but… “Staffless” Reception is really truly awful

This is our second time staying at a digital hotel. This hotel has tablets where you can video call with staff representatives.

Firstly, when we were trying to enter the hotel at 6 pm, the front doors would not even open. We attempted the call button, but no one answered. The only reason we were able to enter to do our digital check in was because someone else happened to enter at the same time.

Secondly, no front staff to receive baggage that has been shipped to this hotel. The digital staff could not help us locate our luggage. They didn’t offer to call the luggage service for us in Japanese since we cannot speak fluently. They basically told us to fend for ourselves and go to the office.

Thirdly, I booked a No Pets room because I have an allergy. They put us in a pets room and it smelled awful like wet dog and I started to have hives immediately. Again, tried to contact digital staff. First time, they said they will call me back. I waited at the tablet for ten minutes, no call. I tried a second time and they said they will call my phone number, but since I am a foreigner, I do not have phone service in Japan. Luckily they finally understood and changed our room.

Fourthly, the digital staff cannot even call a taxi to the hotel for us? We have 5 luggages. We cannot bring that many on the bus. We needed to take multiple trips to the Yamato at Atami Station to ship them.

Finally, sometimes using a tablet will give a message “please call again at a later time.”

The pros are the amenities and room, where the front staff money went to.

Amenities: Drink bar is nice, coffee, tea, alcohol, juices at certain hours. Also has small snacks like party nuts, chocolate rocks, other sweet candies, and ice cream bar. Women’s spa is basically a large heated bath, but facial products and skin care are nice as well as hair dryers. Men’s spa had sauna and one other extra room. Second floor area had a frozen food vending machine and lounge area. Rooftop was spacious and had wonderful views of both city and Oceanside.

Room was very spacious especially compared to Tokyo hotels. View of the ocean was nice…

I understand that the staff has gone digital so they can upgrade the amenities like spa and amenities bar, but it really would be ideal for them to have 1 or 2 staffs that can assist with simple things on-site like holding luggage can hailing taxi.

If are a foreigner and shipping luggage and need help getting a cab due to multiple bags please avoid this hotel...

The entrance gate doesn’t open until someone walks closer. This was not explicitly written anywhere so we got stuck and tried to figure out for quite some time.The kitchen staff was not able to guide us as well as there is no front. The first impression is very bad.We had another reservation through Rakuten travel as we didn’t know that we need to add a comment to the reservation, we didn’t receive any pre checkin information. The bell at the front door doesn’t connect to anyone to answer as we tried several times when fail with the key.Very bad experience with only kitchen staff.Saved money and time for the company and wasted our time to complete checkin. It’s really bad to let traveller assume this bad experience when the company should provide a smooth checkin service. Plus, the women from the tablet had very bad attitude. Even deliberately let us wait when after the first time she dropped the phone line.She pretended she doesn’t speak good Chinese but I believe she is a native. This is another bad part. Not just attitude, as a staff this is definitely bad training from...

Although some people may feel that it’s a hassle to do online check-in without a ‘proper’ hotel front desk assistance, we didn’t have any issues. We could submit our personal details via our mobile phones anywhere anytime prior arriving. Then upon arriving, using the PIN sent to our emails, we could smoothly enter the entrance. At the lobby, there were tablets, for each guests to take their picture for verification to the information we had submitted beforehand. Then we were connected to a call centre which asked us some simple questions then it was done. We loved that there were free flow of hot & cold drinks, alcohol and non-alcohol, free flow chocolates/sweets/japanese nuts available. We were a group of 7, so we used the common space for our meals. The rooms were huge for Japan standards with a small sink, dining table attached. Each booking came with a car park lot. The car park is just a 2-3 minutes drive away and we just parked accordingly to our room number. I cannot be more pleased with my stay here and will definitely recommend friends...