EN HOTEL Hamamatsu

The hotel was clean and felt very safe, with a train station and good restaurants nearby. Restaurant reservations can save a lot of time. The double bed was too small to really count as a double, so for two people I’d suggest booking twin beds. You can unload luggage on the footpath outside, then drive about 200 metres to the parking building on the left. The hotel subsidizes the fee if you bring your parking ticket to the staff.

For a very cheap one-night stop, it was workable, and breakfast buffet was included. But the place felt dated, grubby, and unpleasant, and I wasn’t impressed. The AC barely pushed air, like someone blowing through a straw. Worst of all, the carpet was covered in dark stains. I didn’t want to walk on it barefoot in my room. It looked older than the hotel itself, like a New York City parking lot had spent the night there. I’ve never seen so many stains on carpet. I doubt even a turbo team-up of Mike Rowe and Stanley Steamer could clean it.

The hotel is close to the station, in a fairly quiet spot. Our room faced the tracks, but the thick walls muffled the Shinkansens passing every 10-15 minutes. There were loads of regular AC and USB-A outlets, so we could charge everything without adapters or a power strip. The QR codes around the place made me think it had recently been updated. The shower and bed were decent sizes, though the climate control wasn’t: we could either have low heat that made the room uncomfortably warm or open the window and get too cold.

The attendants were kind and nice, but I still wouldn’t recommend this hotel, even at the low price. The rooms were old, dirty, and poorly maintained. The carpet was filthy, and the TV remote was too gross to touch. Maybe it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. Hard to believe this happens in Japan too!