Ab Hotel Hikone

The morning breakfast had a good mix of Japanese and Western basics, and it was included. Our room had plenty of space for three big twin beds. The mattresses and pillows were just okay, but the large flatscreen TV was great, with lots of background music choices and the option to sign into a streaming service. Gorgeous hotel!

My room's bathroom smelled like a sweaty person, which was unpleasant. The payment trouble was worse. I paid at the machine, got my room key card and receipt, then the next evening the hotel called to say the machine had malfunctioned and apparently returned all the cash I had put in. They asked me to pay again. They showed me surveillance footage to check what happened, but it wasn't clear that all the money had come back. I had a fairly large amount of cash in my purse and hadn't checked the change carefully at the time, so with no other option I paid them again by hand. I still don't understand why this came up after the machine had taken payment and issued my card and receipt. Then, after I'd paid again, they called at midnight to say there had been another payment mistake. It felt like they were careless with money and didn't care about the customer. Even though the hotel's own mistakes caused this, I was treated like a criminal until I paid again. I've never encountered such an impolite hotel in Asia. If you want to avoid a bad stay in Hikone, I recommend Toyoko-Inn. The hotel also promised to issue a report about the payment machine problem by the next day, and agreed to report the staff's mistaken payment claim too. A day later, when I checked out, they still hadn't issued either report. They are terrible liars.

As a solo traveler, I had a really good stay here :)

The location was awful for us. We had to park about a ten-minute walk from the hotel.