Togetsutei - Kyoto

Superb place to stay and relax under arashiyama. Traditional Japanese ryokan and the best service and environment you can probably have. Traditional Japanese style dinner and breakfast included. Also provides you a cell phone with data to use during your stay. You can enjoy in-room onsen or public onsen within the ryokan. I also got 2000yen coupon to use for any purchase during the stay (sale, souvenir store, private onsen, etc.) Pricy but you must try it for at least once!

Pros - Picturesque location even at night - Decent food - Decent staff Cons - As a relatively poor college student looking for something a bit extravagant, price is rather high. - Food had inconsistency in flavoring. Some things had strong flavoring some things had weak flavoring. - Baths are small.

I’ve been to many onsen hotels, this has the best view, since I booked the most expensive one. However the food was not impressive at all and not enough(specially for guys). All small appetiser, without mains, like pot, beef or noodle. The Most disappointed part is the public and private onsen was TOTALLY INDOOR, NO VIEWS AT ALL! Just like an average big water tub. I will definitely come to this area again but not this hotel for sure.

We really enjoyed the authentic ryokan and onsen experience. The room was beautiful, the staff extremely accommodating and location wonderful!! Suggest to choose their dinner and breakfast package which you can enjoy the Kyoto cuisine.

I like it’s good service at great location . Room was all right. Food definitely need to improve . They serve very dried fish to customers. You can tell the chef didn’t paid attention to the meal they served. Breakfast buffet was all right at least better than the kasaki dinner.

Amazing attention to detail from accommodation to food to service. To give you an idea - after a whole day of walking in wet winter weather, we found our shoes cleaned and warmed the next day when we were about to head out.

My girlfriend and I went here for a single night and we went with my elderly parents as well who stayed in the room next to us. In general we found the stay very interesting. Dinner is included in the price which is quite neat and it is served to you in your room, and they were very good to accomodate all four of us eating in our room so that we could eat together. It is extremely well presented and you have lots of small courses (about seven courses I think it was). I can't say we liked eating everything we got (in general we liked about 50% of it and my family are extremely non-fussy eaters who experiment a lot and normally like everything), however it didn't really matter that there were things we didn't like, as it was interesting. The biggest problem though that kind of ruined dinner is that we didn't know what we were eating 90% of the time. The woman who was serving us had pretty much no English, and as you are eating in your room you only interact with that one person and so can't get help from another staff member. They do provide a written menu but it is only in Japanese (I asked if they had it in English and even the next day at reception so that we could find out what we had eaten, but No). Location is pretty good, just across an enjoyable walk across the bridge to the touristy shopping area, temple and bamboo gardens. Some rooms look out over the river, but our room was actually in a totally different building that was across the road, and we looked out onto a steep bank, but they had made it look quite nice with plants, stones etc. Sleeping is on a thin mattress which is rolled out directly onto the tatami mats that you walk around on (the staff prepare and remove all the bedding for you). This is a fun way to sleep, however be warned... if you like a soft-to-medium bed it will be an uncomfortable night as these are extremely hard. I normally like a fairly hard bed and I was surprised just how hard this was. Also the pillows are tiny (and also very hard). They provided two which worked OK for me, but my partner ended up with those two and also one of the cushions from the room to make a decent pillow. The buffet breakfast was in the main building which does look out over a canal that runs parallel to the main river. This was OK but nothing amazing. The shared onsen was quite good though it is totally indoors with no windows so feels a bit like an enclosed box, unlike most other onsens I have been to here. One thing that I did like was that they had a little sauna, and even better they had a cold water pool as well which was nice to swap back and forth between. The staff in general were very polite and good, though their English wasn't very good.

The hotel is beautiful, we can really feel the sincerity of the staffs in trying to make our stay a pleasant one. Their attention to the detail is shown in the service, the kaiseki dinner, the breakfast buffet and the room. We had a very comfortable stay at Togetsutei.