Comfort Hotel Hiroshima Otemachi

The large library-style lobby was easily my favorite part, and the staff were very friendly. The rooms were also very clean for an older hotel. The location was fine, with a streetcar stop a two-minute walk away, though I needed to ride it to reach the main shopping areas. There’s laundry on site too. My main issue was getting ready in the morning: the bathroom had no outlet, and the mirror by the door was about six feet from the nearest one, which is awkward with a corded razor or hair dryer. The elevators could be slow at busy times, and there wasn’t really a non-emergency stair option. I’ve stayed in lots of small rooms in Japan and don’t mind them, but this room’s layout was hard for two people to manage, so we changed how the beds were arranged. It felt only a little better than a capsule hotel.

The staff were really nice, but the sleep and breakfast weren’t good compared with the other seven hotels we’ve stayed at during our 20-day trip through Japan. I’m not demanding, yet the pillows were awful and very hard, and the mattress wasn’t good either. The other three-star hotels we tried had much better pillows and mattresses. There wasn’t cheese, meat, or another savory topping for bread, just jam or a burger to put on it. The fruit looked fresh in the display, but it was frozen. I put some in my yogurt and my teeth froze, which wasn’t comfortable. The yogurt tasted strange too.

The staff were really friendly, but the rooms are very small. The AC was set to heating, so we had to open the windows. With trains passing every 5 minutes, that got annoying.

The room felt crowded, and our group seemed to be sharing the hotel with a school tour of high school kids, so the elevator got really busy. The location was great, though. A short walk brought us to the shopping street, big bookstores full of anime and figurines, and fun places to drink. There was an Onitsuka outlet (?) nearby that I couldn't get to, but someone in my group found a really cute pair. The metro runs along the road, which was fun to watch.