A local girl in Nagoya — the honest answer is that a plain business hotel is right for most of your trip, and one ryokan night is worth more than five.
💴 Cost: business hotel ¥8,000–15,000 a night · ryokan ¥15,000–40,000 per person
📍 Where: next to a station, always — that matters more than the hotel
😰 Difficulty: low, but the room will be smaller than you think
1. Business hotel for most nights. Clean, cheap, spotless, five minutes from a train
2. One ryokan night, not a week. It is an experience, not a place to sleep
3. Book near a station, not near a sight. You will walk to the station ten times a day
4. Kyoto’s lodging tax rose sharply on 1 March 2026 — up to ¥10,000 a night at the top end
5. Rooms are 12–15 m². Your suitcase will not open next to the bed
What each type actually costs
Four kinds of place, and they are not competing for the same night of your trip.
- Business hotel — ¥8,000–15,000 a room. Tiny, immaculate, always beside a station. This is the correct default for most of your trip
- Capsule — ¥3,500–6,000 . A bed in a pod, shared bath, luggage in a locker. Fine for one night, tiring for three
- Hostel — ¥3,500–7,000 . Unusually clean and quiet here — worth a look even if you stopped doing hostels years ago
- Ryokan — ¥15,000–40,000 per person, usually with dinner and breakfast. Read that again: per person, not per room
Why the business hotel wins
The room is 12–15 m². The bed touches two walls. You cannot open a large suitcase on the floor without standing on the bed — this is not a bad hotel, this is every hotel in this price band.
What you get instead is the thing that shapes a trip: a station exit ninety seconds from the front door. In a country where you move by train, that beats square metres. Add a coin laundry in the basement and no tipping anywhere, ever.
TSŪ INFORMATIONwhat Japanese connoisseurs know
Look for a business hotel with a 大浴場 (daiyokujō), a large shared bath on the top floor. It costs almost nothing extra and it gives you the best part of the ryokan experience — a deep hot soak after fourteen kilometres of walking — on every night of your trip instead of one. Filter for public bath or onsen when you search.
The ryokan night, done properly
A ryokan is not simply a hotel in Japanese dress. It is a fixed evening with a shape to it, and if you treat it as an ordinary hotel you will miss most of what you paid for.
- Arrive by 15:00–16:00. Dinner is served at a set time, often 18:00. Arriving at 20:00 means the kitchen has already given up on you
- Bath before dinner, in a yukata after. Wash and rinse fully on the stool first — the bath itself is for soaking, not for cleaning
- Your futon appears while you eat. Nobody is being mysterious; that is simply how the room turns over
- Do not book it for your first night. Jet lag plus an eight-course dinner at 18:00 is money set on fire
The tax nobody warns you about
Several cities charge a lodging tax per person per night, and it is usually not in the price you saw when booking. You pay it at the desk, often in cash. Kyoto raised its rates on 1 March 2026 and now has the highest in the country.
- Kyoto: ¥200 under ¥6,000 · ¥400 for ¥6,000–19,999 · ¥1,000 for ¥20,000–49,999 · ¥4,000 for ¥50,000–99,999 · ¥10,000 at ¥100,000 and above
- Osaka: nothing under ¥5,000, then ¥200 · ¥400 · ¥500 as the rate climbs
- Tokyo: ¥100 from ¥10,000, ¥200 above ¥15,000 — small, for now
- Kanazawa, Fukuoka, Sapporo and Sendai charge their own. Budget ¥400 a person a night and you will not be surprised
Separately, everyone leaving Japan pays a ¥3,000 departure tax — it is inside your flight ticket, so there is nothing to do about it.
When to book, and where
- Normal weeks: 2–3 months ahead is comfortable
- Late March to early April (cherry blossom) and November (autumn leaves): 5–6 months, and prices roughly double
- Avoid completely: 29 April–5 May, mid-August, and 29 December–3 January. The whole country travels at once
- Ryokan with a private open-air bath sell out first — book those before anything else in your trip
For business hotels and ryokan alike, Booking.com and Agoda both carry the Japanese chains and show the free-cancellation rate clearly. Check both before you commit — on the same room they are often ¥1,000–2,000 apart, and not always in the same direction.
One thing to fix before you arrive
Check-in is almost always 15:00, and your flight lands long before that. Any hotel will hold your bags from the morning — but if you land at Haneda at 07:00 and your hotel is in Kyoto, that does not help. Read where to leave your luggage before you plan day one, and how to get in from the airport before you book the first night.
Everything else in order: the full Japan trip checklist.