Very disappointed to be writing this review... Firstly, their website is dreadfully dated and their booking system puzzling, even comically so. It almost feels like using the Wayback Machine... I tried booking five or six months in advance and so I wrote to the hotel to express my excitement for both coming back to Imabari where I once lived and worked teaching English in 1999, and also that I had always wanted to stay at the hotel, as I actually lived directly across the road from the hotel and always thought it so exclusive and luxurious-looking, and it was the talk-of-the-town back in '99 when they were still very new. I was willing to pay a substantial room rate for a Tatami Suite (approx. ¥30,000 per night for three nights) however was advised that they were sold-out for my desired dates-of-stay in March 2023. What irked me is that no alternative accommodation options were offered, despite there still being availability on third-party websites such as *********** and ******* for other room types, and there was no acknowledgment of my excitement and enthusiasm for wanting to be a guest of theirs' after so many years, or for any disappointment caused. This is terrible service, and not exactly what one would call 'growing the business' to reject a potential guest despite having other rooms and suites available to sell. We instead booked ourselves a wa****su (traditional Japanese tatami room) at Hotel Kikusui Imabari down by the port, which was cute, comfortable, clean, and looks to have had recently had a refurbishment of their guestrooms as the bathrooms while small were nice and new. The cost of this room was also about a third of what the Kokusai Imabari Hotel asks for their Tatami Suites as well. I still wanted to go to the Kokusai Imabri Hotel however and at least see their gardens and lobby, pick up some Imbari towels from the official store at the front entrance, and have breakfast in their restaurant. The lobby is very nice and it does have the grandeur of a Japanese hotel trying to be a European hotel without being tacky or dated, and it does appear that they have recently cleaned all the chandeliers (I'd read other reviews and this seems to have been a first impression for a lot of guests, so this was a nice surprise to see them dust-free). We had a look at the gardens outside and they were very nice and maintained as to be expected with Japanese gardens. So why the 1 star review? Well, we wanted to treat ourselves to what we thought would be a five-star breakfast. We were told to go upstairs to the mezzanine level and we met a nice lady staff member who advised that breakfast would be roughly ¥2,400 per person. No problem, that's fair for a good buffet breakfast. We were then however lead into a huge banquet hall with only a couple of dozen guests dining, which made it feel even emptier and more like a school cafeteria rather than a classy restaurant. We then went to the buffet and it seems that none of the bain mar
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40 รีวิว