Yamagata Hotels with Bars

Conveniently attached to Yamagata JR Station, for easy access to Tokyo Shinkansen, as well as to daytrips to Ginzan Onsen and Zao Onsen Ski Resort. Our room was in the newer South Annex, comfortable and spacious. Hotel granted our room request and were attentive to our stated diet requirements. We chose Japanese breakfast set on both days and they were delicious, of excellent quality and good portions. We used one of the coin laundry machines on 2F, but wished there were more machines offered on different floors.

It is a recommended hotel when using high-speed buses and Yamagata Airport shuttle bus to Sendai City. It was a hotel with conscientious accommodation and hospitality. There is a repeat if you only sleep in a location that is not troubled by neighboring restaurants.

It is an old hotel, so you may not want to take a bath in your room, but their public bath is good. This place is on the hill which means you will not want to walk by your own in winter because of the slippery Mountain path. But in other hand it is really convenient because they provide shuttle bus to bus station or cable car station. And there is a ski place just in front of the hotel, you can borrow the equipments from hotel.

I will consider going there again in the future. It is very suitable for a single person, a young couple, or a family of three with children. If breakfast is included, breakfast starts at 7:30, and lunch and dinner can also be booked. In winter, it is very comfortable to have a radiator just like other places. The only thing is that when using water, you need to turn on the faucet in advance and wait for the water to heat up. It should be a warm family-style hotel managed by a family. The location is excellent, right next to the ski slopes.

Friends booked us in at Sangoro so we could ski in / out... and it truly is ski in/out... not like places at the bottom of the hill where u can only ski in/out if there’s a decent amount of snow. Sangoro is at mid-mountain, so if the resort is open for the winter season, you can ski in / out of this hotel. The disadvantage of being at mid-mountain is that there is only Sangoro there and you can’t leave / get back there from The main village after 5pm. So all your evenings are spent at the hotel. It wasn’t a problem for us, but I think you’d get cabin fever if u stayed there too long. They have a reasonable dinner menu that is mostly Japanese but has a few western and vegetarian options (spaghetti with soy meat and margarita pizza). They have a soft drink machine and soup machine which are free for people staying there (all u can drink). There’s also a pool table, table tennis table, a few games and a massage chair u can use (the massage chair is quite good after a day on the slopes). The bathrooms are Japanese (shared) but you can only use them between 7-9am and 5-10pm... only showers can be used in the morning but they fill up the big hot baths in the evenings. The women’s bathroom is down on the lowest level, so you have to go down 2 or 3 flights of stairs to get there. Men’s bathroom is on the main floor, with the hotel rooms 1 and 2 floors above. There are no elevators, so you need to be ok with climbing the fairly steep stairs and carrying luggage up/down. They have a drying room on the lowest level for ski gear, but someone kept opening the window in the room so it was always very cold in there (no point putting your stuff in there to dry). One thing everyone in our group complained about was the beds and/or pillows... not comfortable at all! I had poor sleep as I had to keep rotating all night or my arm or leg would go numb. The people working at the hotel are really nice. Some of them speak better English than others... we didn’t have any language issues but we did have a couple of people in our group who speak good Japanese, which was helpful for anything complicated. To get to the hotel you have to catch the Chuo Ropeway up to mid-mountain and get the hotel to pick you up in their special car (on tracks to drive on the snow). If you need lift tickets it’s a little cheaper to purchase them from the hotel but you. I enjoyed my time at Sangoro (except the beds), but it’s not somewhere I’d stay for a really long time due to its remoteness (there are really good and not so good things about being isolated on the mountain).

In addition to the room is a little smaller, but the bunk beds are OK, there is nothing wrong with it, the staff inside are very warm, there are dogs, friendly to children

The minor problem is that the door lock is very difficult to be unlocked. There is instruction to turn counter clockwise but it looks like sometimes work sometimes don’t work. Otherwise excellent.