THE SINGULARI HOTEL & SKYSPA AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS JAPAN (CANDEO HOTELS Group) — Hotel in Osaka

06/09/2024 Booked a standard twin room as a gift for my partner on his birthday. We also wanted to experience a 4-star hotel and I went for this since it is one of the top-rated hotels around Osaka.

Room quality: For a hotel in Japan, room size is surprisingly wide. You get a sofa bed beside the window which will give you a nice view especially at night. Overall, the room feels premium. Although, the smell of the carpet is strong and is noticeable upon entering the room, so I wish they could fix that.

Facilities: They don't have any restaurants, but the hotel is located 1 minute away from Universal City Walk so you have a lot of food options. They only offer a breakfast buffet, and the Sky Spa, which is an indoor and outdoor hot spring bath, with Sauna, at the top floor. It has a small lounge where you can stay before / after your bath, with several food and drinks vending machines, but the couch is really dirty, with so much liquid stains, which I hope is just water. For a 4-star hotel, that was kind of disappointing.

Bathroom standards: 3.1 -For the bathroom inside the room, 5/5! Really clean, and complete with basic amenities: Shampoo, Conditioner, Body wash, Toothbrushes, Body and Face Towels, and a hair dryer. You can also get razors, body towel, cotton swabs, etc., from the lobby as you please. 3.2 - For the Sky Spa Public Bath, it was also really clean, including inside the Sauna. Great city lights view, which adds to the relaxation, but gets crowded at night. Same amenities are provided: Shampoo, Conditioner and Body wash, and with additional facial wash, lotion and emulsion. There is just one thing that was really disappointing for me: their hair dryers are clogged with hair and dust that most of them don't work anymore. You would not expect an issue like this from a 40star hotel so I wish they could also fix that.

Service: Since I booked more than a month in advance, they were able to handle my requests upon booking: room on a high floor (13th out of 14 floors) and put our twin beds together to make one big bed, so I really appreciated that. But unfortunately, from check-in to Breakfast buffet, you can really tell they are understaffed. It was 4PM and there weren't a lot of people, but we waited for a good 5-7 minutes before we were accommodated. During breakfast, the staff who took out the food from the kitchen to the buffet table was the same person cleaning up the food that was dropped on the floor, hopefully not with the same gloves. We had a better and cleaner experience on a breakfast buffet at a 3-star hotel.

Food and beverage: The hotel is 1-minute away from the restaurants, so I guess that counts. For their breakfast buffet, food options were quite a lot for a hotel breakfast, so I thought that was really good.

Safety and security: Automatic door lock and key card on the elevator. So I guess 5/5

Maintenance: The toilet at the lobby was a little dirty when I went in in the morning. Couch at the lounge area on the top floor is dirty. I guess this is also a result of lack of staff.

Location: Location is...

We choose the hotel due to its location and the hot springs. We booked for 2 nights, 2 rooms. We looked through some TripAdvisor reviews and YouTube as a reference beforehand, but it seems that the hotel is not as well maintained as most of the review said it would be. |The hotel check in staff doesn’t speak English very well and mostly depended on translation app which could caused confusion. ||Cleanliness |The carpet on each floor lobby leading to the hotel rooms is quite dirty with lots of stain and dust. As we walked into our room, the room smelled like cigarettes and very stuffy. I was quite worry as my 6 year old son could get asthma because of it. Inside the room, the green sofa is full of stains. The overall experience made me think that the room is not very clean. The toilet was ok, cleanliness was acceptable. |I booked through Agoda and it is one of the cheapest rooms in the hotel but I didn’t think I would be facing a wall or train station with a light which turned on 24 hrs a day. |The hot spring level seems a bit more well maintained but I didn’t realized that we were supposed to bring our own towels. The other hot spring we went to in our trip had towels in that hot spring level. Later we found that it was written on the 2 pages a4 paper full of information that we were supposed to read when we checked in. But it was very late when we checked in and I didn’t finish reading all the information before going to bed. The lock for the female hot spring is also broken, which made me worried a little that anyone can come in. I also saw a woman wearing a full wetsuit with tshirt and shorts in the hot spring which made me felt quite uncomfortable. ||The waiting area outside the hot spring had a nice view. But again the sofas were full of stain and they were white colored mold like stained. |Also need to mention that free late check out is not available in the hotel. They will start charging you per hour if you leave after 11 am, which I thought was quite odd and inflexible, compare to most of the other Japanese hotels we have been. ( the rule was also written on the 2 pages of A4 paper , which we are supposed to read myself after we checked in) |Overall, not great service or experience, the worst hotel for this Japan trip for us, and we have stayed in 5...

I do not recommend this hotel to travellers for the following reasons:

The rooms are noticeably smaller than all the other hotels I stayed at in Japan for comparable prices (about 400-450 AUD per night).

The hotel room smelt like mould and wet dog. It was a non-smoking room. This must be a known issue as you can ‘rent’ an air freshener for your room if there is enough available.

There is a small fridge and freezer in the room, which is good. This has to be switched on by the guest. However, while making up the room, housekeeping switched off the fridge, resulting in all our food from 7/11 going off and having to be thrown out.

The hotel was unable to facilitate simple functions such as transporting luggage to the room after it arrived by the standard hotel-to-hotel luggage transport service in Japan. Not the end of the world; however this was the only hotel to struggle with this request.

The curtains in the room are not blackout curtains. Get ready for all the light when the sun comes up.

I paid to stay here due to the advertised Skyspa. I’m familiar with tattoos having to be covered in Japanese baths, and while the hotel detailed the rules to using the spa, they did not provide stickers for tattoos as advertised; therefore, making the skyspa somewhat irrelevant to my stay. Not critical but disappointing.

The hotel was unable to facilitate any level of early check in. I understand this is circumstantial or case by case; however the hotel was nowhere near full and this seems somewhat...