Shikotsuko Daiichi Hotel Suizantei — Hotel in Chitose

Reserved a room on the 2nd floor with outdoor private Onsen and a full crab course dinner. It’s over 70000 yen in total.

Pros: The manager who greeted us and helped us with parking the car and moving luggage was helpful and professional. The bell staff who helped us with the luggage and getting the car after checkout is so helpful and courteous. The Onsen both private and public are of high quality. They have the best origin of hot spring and the Onsen manager (湯守). The water is of a perfect temperature all the time and the smooth and silky water itself is so moisturizing to the skin! The ryokan is quiet and the room is very clean.

Cons: the dinner was awful and shameful. The crabs are all cheap frozen food which are all tasteless and the hairy crab has a stale fishy smell. We made a complaint and the manager made an adjustment which didn’t change the fact that we had a very unpleasant dinner experience but only made the matter didn’t get even worse. The waitress who seated us at dinner didn’t serve us tea or anything to drink after serving us the first two courses. We wanted to order drinks and had to wait for 10 minutes before she came back! Poor service at the lounge serving free cocktails. The breakfast was okay but it was served in a canteen like place with no views or view of the Carpark. No service at all. The cold brew coffee ran out by the time I got there at 9:30. The tea mugs in the lounge on the second floor were all used at 9:30 and no one attended to that! The last breakfast time is 9 am and the checkout time is 11am!!!!! They suppose everything ceases its service at 9:30? The room was huge and partly renovated. But the layout is silly. You don’t understand why the washing basins were at the back of the beds while the bath and shower and towels are at another end of the room far far away from the place where you groom yourselves. The tea making corner has no washing basin and is next to the toilet! The worst ryokan...

Overall a MAGICAL location for an onsen hotel and just wonderful staff, great service and just overall lovely experience. I will stay here in the future for more than one night. The whole experience was just lovely. The outdoor onsen was just amazing in the -10 degree air and snow blowing sideways! It was quite the experience and I love that they have snow covered wooden chairs you can sit in and cool off and enjoy the view and cool off in the freezing air. I love the feeling when your hair freezes solid then you get in a warm bath. The outdoor bath is warm but not hot which I think is because the natural hotspring is not that hot. It is nice though as you don't really overheat as you can in other onsen pools. They do have a hot pool inside so I found myself doing a routine of sitting in the outside pool to relax, then going to the inside pool to super heat up, then going to the outdoor cold pool which is REALLY COLD and super refreshing. It was super snowy the night we went there but it cleared up in the morning which was great because we could see the amazing view of the lake and distant mountains when eating breakfast and in the onsen. We went to the onsen for the evening and morning. Just lovely. The food was pretty good. The room is fantasic and has such an old world charm. OH! And they do have a secret natural onsen down by the water. ;-)

We stayed her on our last night in Hokkaido before we flew out at 2:30pm to Osaka. I give you the time of flight because the checkout time of 10am works perfectly for driving to CTS, dropping off the rental car, taking the shuttle to the airport, and checking-in for our flight with time to spare.

The snowy drive around the lake and in the woods to the airport was just magical. Great end to this part...

The hotel is very well built with traditional Japanese building elements, the staff members are very polite and surprisingly young. It's situated right next to the lake so you can enjoy the stunning view of the lake during sun rise and sunset easily.

If you are planning to stay longer make sure you have what you need as there's no convenient stores near-by, you have to drive 30mins to get to the closest town Chitose if you need anything. They have cigarettes and drinks vending machines inside the hotel if that's what you all need.

The room is neat and tidy with a very nice view looking at the lake, there's a common room as well where you can serve yourself with hot tea and chill. There's a pretty big bath room with a big bath tub that can easily fit 2 grown-ups but it is disappointing that it can never fill up as the valve keeps opening up when the water level is 5-6cm deep, and there are cracks on the sprinkler head so water keeps coming from all directions. I should have notified the staff but I didn't end up doing it as I don't want the hassle to have people fix it or change room, but I couldn't bath with those problems so I ended up going to the public bath and onsen instead, which is quite nice and the outdoor one is even better.

The restaurant is a very decent one but I have to say the food choices are not my favorite, too plain and veggie and the taste is very raw sometimes... You have a lot of privacy during dinner time as they put you into different small cubicles. Another thing I have to complain is the use of disposable chopsticks, set aside the reason of environmental protection, they are too coarse to feel the delicacy of food which is a big mark deduction for...