The New Otani Yuzawa is located in rural Japan, and it's important to keep this in mind when making any comparisons. Staying in town was a good idea for proximity to the station. We stayed 4 nights at the hotel. The staff is genuine and wants to be helpful, but the limits of that help become quickly apparent. I am allergic to cigarette smoke, and so a genuine non-smoking room is essential to me, or I have to fine another hotel. (Sometimes Japanese hotels will place an ozone generator in a smoking room and then tell you that the room is non-smoking. I've tried to stay in these, and I can't breath after a while.) I booked a non-smoking room, and I also e-mailed ahead to the address on this particular hotel's website to specify a genuine, non smoking. When we arrived, the desk clerk used a computer translator to tell us we had been assigned a room that would be de-odorized. When I tried to explain that I needed a real non-smoking room, a woman was called from the back to talk with us. Over the years, I have learned to express this need in crude Japanese - and this did the trick. Luckily, they did have a non-smoking room available, and we were assigned one. Because smoking and non-smoking rooms exist on the same floor, and sometimes across the hall from each other, we still had smoke very nearby. The hallways also smell of smoke, as do the elevators. We did not see smoking in the restaurant for breakfast, but we also did not see a "no smoking" notice for this restaurant. Our room itself was between standard and "nice". It was large enough and the beds were comfortable. At this particular hotel, guests are asked to wear the hotel's official robe and a pair of supplied slippers whenever they move about within the hotel. The problem is that the slippers are comfortable only if you are a male with a US shoe size under 9 and 1/2. When I asked our kindly room attendant if larger slippers were available, I was told that they came only in one size. Breakfast came with our room, and it was a strange affair, and not because the food was strange to us. Some days, the buffet was well filled, other days we would arrive well within the proscribed hours and find that little was available. I mean like, no eggs, almost no fruit, no cereal, etc. Our only conclusion was that they set out a certain amount of food each day, and if a group was eating early, people arriving in the middle of breakfast time simply got very little to eat. (One morning there was no dried cereal. When I asked repeatedly for dry cereal, someone eventually did bring some for me.) The hotel van runs regularly to the train station, but when I asked the driver to drop me at the post office a few blocks away, I was told transportation went only to the station. One good point about the hotel, we were allowed to check out at noon, when many of the hotels in Yuzawa have a mandatory 10 am checkout. Our art tours in the Echigo Yuzawa Art field lasted until about 7:00 pm Because most restaurants in Yuzawa closed at 7:00 pm during the time of our stay, including the hotel's, we found our dinners in the form of bento boxes at 7-11. That's a little sad, but on the other hand we had one or two great lunches and didn't have to put up with a smoky dining room at dinner. We probably would look for other lodging if we visited Yuzawa again. There are many hotels in town.…
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