Rakuten Stay Fukuoka - Yakuin

The room was larger and cleaner than I expected from the reviews. Self check-in was a bit of a mess, and the bathroom was tiny, but the shower was good. The location was okay.

The room itself was honestly nice, modern, and spacious enough for our luggage. It was clean apart from the stained, dirty bedding. The hotel advertises space for eight people, though I can’t imagine that many fitting comfortably. There were two queen-size bunk beds, and we had to make up the top bunks ourselves. The balcony has somewhere to hang laundry, but the pole needed for the drying setup wasn’t provided, so that was useless. We stayed with three friends, and check-in was difficult from the start. The promised details never arrived 48 hours beforehand. We had to call the night before to ask how to check in, and we struggled to understand the woman on the phone. At the hotel, you enter your information on an iPad in the lobby, then call for your room PIN. Despite being advertised as a staffed hotel, it isn’t manned. I wouldn’t recommend staying here based on that check-in process alone. The washing machine sounded like it was shredding clothes, or like knives being sharpened for 40 minutes. I couldn’t have fallen asleep with that noise. I’ve attached a video.

Email them instead of using the contact button on the iPad. Check-in was difficult, and nobody picked up when we tried calling. It’s no fun getting a “please try again at a later time” message while carrying all your luggage. The address shown didn’t take us to the right place on Google Maps, so search for the hotel name instead.

Our bunk-bed room was lovely, clean, and spacious, so I would have given the place five stars if check-in hadn’t taken about an hour. There’s no in-person check-in, and I had a couple of reservation issues. It was hard to reach the right person through the tablet. We were only in Fukuoka for the night, and losing that hour meant we couldn’t visit some of the places we’d planned to.