APA Hotel Kagoshima Tenmonkan

We spent one night in the new wing. The view was good from our high-floor room, and the room itself was small in the usual way, but clean. Everything was as we expected.

The bathrooms were spacious and clean, the staff were really nice, and the beds were pretty great. Still, the room smelled strongly of cigarette smoke, which was awful for me as someone with asthma and allergies. I thought about asking to switch rooms, but I was exhausted and decided I could manage one night. Then the breakfast buffet made me sick, and the coin laundry didn’t dry my clothes at all, so I’m carrying wet clothes around in my bag. For the same money or less, I could have stayed elsewhere and kept going. I’d been looking forward to this after hopping between capsule hotels around Kyushu, so I was surprisingly disappointed. Now that I know APA seems geared toward Japanese businessmen and not really anyone else, I probably won’t stay at another one.

The location was the only thing we liked. We stayed two nights with two elderly relatives and a young child, and the service left us very dissatisfied. The hotel has two buildings, but ours had no reception desk. We had to take all our luggage to the other building to check in, then roll everything back ourselves. Nobody helped, and there wasn’t even a trolley. When we asked the receptionist to book a restaurant for dinner on our second night, they refused. I’ve visited Japan many times and stayed in all sorts of hotels, and I’ve never been refused help booking a restaurant before. In my experience, hotel staff are usually happy to help, especially since many Japanese restaurant staff don’t speak English. Not here. The staff hardly spoke English, didn’t try, and answered rudely. We also asked for a knife to cut fruit, but apparently the whole hotel had none. The room came with two bottles of water, but there was no refill the next day after we’d used them. There was a huge cockroach on the elevator door on our floor, which I’d never encountered anywhere else in Japan. There was no extra bed for children. I understand it’s optional, but I’d advise families not to come. Every refusal came with a bad attitude. For a three-star hotel, it didn’t deserve even one star in my view, from the facilities to the service. I would never return or recommend anyone stay here.

It’s a typical APA with a decent room, though the TV entertainment wasn’t free at this particular one. Getting here by public transport wasn’t ideal: I had to walk 20 minutes from kagoshimachuo with my luggage. It is fairly close to the ferry, though, if you need that.