Stay SAKURA Kyoto Matsuri

Close to the main station but a little far from the main sights but easy to get around via bus. Nice room and hotel, recommended!

I'm on my final night stay and I was very impressed with the hotel when I first arrived. There are some minor things they can fix for the rating to go up in the future. The biggest of which shouldn't have been an issue during my stay. I needed change on two different occasions to use the laundry machines they provide on the ground floor. Mos places that have laundry machines that require coins to operate would have a change machine readily available. The first time I asked for change they were timid to give it to me but did after I explained it was for their laundry machines. The second time I needed to ask on the last day of my one week stay they flat out wouldn't give me change for 500 yen (the machines only take 100 yen coins. They said I'd need to go to family mart or somewhere to get change. My clothes were already in the washer and I was only 1 coin short. Fortunately as I was going back to my clothes to pull them out another guest was coming out and they were gracious enough to give me the change I needed so I wouldn't be wasting my valuable time running to the store for change, which would have taken ~30 mins and they might even want me to buy something. Another issue is there's a motion light in the room that will turn on when you don't want it to (going to the bathroom in the middle of the night) and doesn't stay on when you do want it to (tying your shoes if it takes longer than 20 seconds). There just needs to be an override button but there isn't. There's a balcony but you can't see out because they used frosted glass, and you can't open the door to go out onto the balcony other than just a crack to let air in from outside. I assume this is for security and safety reasons but it's still annoying. There was a meteor shower one night and it would have been really convenient. (This one doesn't go against the score above because it's understandable, this is more just information for others) The location is good but not great. It's close to the train station but pretty much nothing else. Every day your commute is walk 10-15 mins to the train station as that will get you where you're going or the food places at the station or around the station are where you'll need to go. This is a negative because there's pretty much nothing in the 0-10 minute walking time for a quick bite, not even a family mart I don't think. The staff is mostly friendly and helpful, they don't know much English. One of them spoke English fairly well, however still seemed to have a hard time understanding or comprehending what I was saying. Finally I was awoken early in the morning a couple of times by banging sounds possibly from the neighboring rooms sliding bathroom door, aside from that it was mostly quite. The room itself was clean and the hotel cleaned the room every few days. The shower is nice with good water pressure and there's a control to heat the air in the shower and there's a dry setting as well. You'll need to use a camera translation app to read the controls if you can't read Japanese.