This hotel is comfortable and quiet, incredibly convenient for accessing Onomichi and the Shimanami Kaido, but we had one major problem: the rooms smell extremely musty or perhaps of stale body odor?
We stayed in two different rooms across two separate reservations on either side of our Shimanami Kaido adventure.
Initially, we simply thought we had bad luck. We even asked a couple in the elevator if their room was smelly or musty, and they said theirs was fine.
On our second reservation, they were about to give us the same exact room as our previous stay, and we politely explained that the room had an unpleasant odor and was it possible to switch rooms? The staff worked politely to accommodate us, and switched us to another room several doors down.
No such luck: the exact same odor strongly present in the second room. The windows are also locked, so allowing in fresh air isn’t possible
We searched existing reviews to see if anyone else reported this problem, and came up with nothing, which was surprising - most reviews are positively glowing.
This hotel has a lot of positives in its favor - it’s convenient and overall pretty comfortable - but the odor is frankly unacceptable, and made spending time in the room unpleasant.