Kinugawa Park Hotels

The hotel is around 10mins walk from Kinugawa-Onsen Station. Although there are many abandoned hotels, shops, residences, buildings around the surrounding area, I can still explore the area as the street lights are lit in the evening. The hotel is divided into different wings and occupies a large area. I stayed in the upper floors of the hotel’s main building (Kirakukan) but there’s an option to stay at the hotel’s park-cottages that is built on the cliff of the riverbank and overlooks the Kinugawa river. The Kinugawa Park Cottage is located separately further away from the main building. I only noticed a local Japanese family of four or five persons being escorted by the hotel staff to one of the cottages. Other than that one-off encounter, I didn’t see anyone else at the area around the cottage which is also super quiet. Likewise for the other wings of the hotel i.e. Kinoyakata and Kishintei, I didn’t see any guests maybe due to low season. Love the onsen and the private open-air bath, the traditional Japanese kaiseiki breakfast and dinner. There’s also a souvenir shop, ramen & snack shop as well as an outdoor swimming pool which I couldn’t use as it is only available for use come summer time. Just across the road from the hotel, there’s the Waterside Cafe Terrace, a 7-Eleven convenience store adjacent to the hotel and since there’s no self-service washing machine/dryer in the hotel, the nearest 24h laundromat is around a 5-min walk from the hotel located behind the Waterside Cafe Terrace and across the road facing “Galarie Cafe Painto E”. On the day of check-out, the hotel helped to store my luggage and I had lunch at “Suzukawa Cafe” just next to Galarie Cafe Painto E. The food prices here are slightly cheaper than the ones near Kinugawa-Onsen station.

It's not really a ryokan, but a new building that has traditional Japanese rooms in it, which is fine, i guess, as Nikko and Kinugawa-onsen don't have many (if any) real-real ryokans. Staff is nice, some of them even speak decent english, traditional kaiseki is good (but we, judging from the pictures they've posted, expected a private dinner\breakfast and got a common room), room was spacious and felt like unique experience, although on my subsequent trip i wouldn't book a modern building like that one. Onsens are really good, but show some signs of wear. You can get a private one which we didn't do but option is there. Placement is fine, but the train to Nikko takes about 30-40 minutes because it goes so slow.

The exterior of the hotel is pretty, but the interior of the hotel is dated and needs a bit of updating. There were parts of the hotel that were completely shut down (maybe there are saving up enough money to one day renovate). However the facilities and rooms are well maintained and the onsens are beautiful and peaceful. There are 2 main onsens, that are separated by men and women. Each day the onsens are switched, in the morning you will go to one, and in the evening before dinner you can experience the other onsen. Onsite there is a really nice restaurant and gift shop that featured local products at reasonable prices. There is a 24 hour coffee/tea station that is free to use. It's a short 10 minute walk from Kinugawa Onsen Station. When you arrive they provide you a yukata to wear while you are staying at the hotel. The rooms are spacious with options for a western bed or japanese style (sleeping on the floor). We opted for the western bed to be higher off the ground as we thought it would be colder to sleep on the ground. Although the rooms are very well heated and was a bit too warm, that we needed to open the window to cool the room down. The rooms have nice views of the countryside. They provide a pitcher of ice water in the room and you can go to the front desk to refill with ice if more is needed. The bathroom is quite large and has both a shower and toilet in a separate room of the bathroom; although we mostly bathed in the onsen. There is a 7-eleven nearby that was open 24 hours, but otherwise there isn't much else around the hotel. Also the town of Kinugawa Onsen closes quite early, around 8pm it's quite deserted. We were there at the end of November 2024, and it seemed that the hotel was mostly unoccupied, so we felt like we had the place to ourselves. It was a very nice one night stay.