Hi — I’m Tabiiku. I travel around Japan with my daughter on the principle that experience is the best thing you can give a child. This is a stay at TOWA Pure Cottage in Nasu Kogen, the official hotel next door to Nasu Highland Park. I am going to be blunt about this one: the rooms were good and almost everything else was not.
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The rooms themselves were fine
Let me start with what worked. We were travelling as three households, so I had been going back and forth between booking one large place with three bedrooms or three separate cottages close together. Then I found a row of three adjoining units, which solved it.
I had originally booked the Muji “House of Sunlight” series, but reading the small print more carefully I found a warning that it sits a long way from reception — a real problem if you arrive by bus and have no car. So I switched to the California Villa series, which is within walking distance of reception, and booked without hesitating.
It had clearly been renovated recently and the interiors were lovely. That said: even though ours is about as close to reception as the cottages get, the walk to reception and to the dinner venue is still a proper walk. If you are not driving, do not book anything described as outside walking distance of reception.
The food and the operation were poor
Now the substance. What ruined this trip was the quality of the food and the general standard of service, the running of the place included.
Check-in first. The queue is brutal. I complain about inefficient check-in almost everywhere I go, but this went well beyond anything I had imagined. Everyone arrives at 3pm — this is not a surprise, it happens every single day — and there were nowhere near enough people on the desk to cope. I think we stood there for more than thirty minutes.
It gets worse, because you have to call at reception before anything else, which means every guest drives to reception at the same time. You can see where this goes: not only is the car park full, the road leading to it is gridlocked. Why each cottage does not simply have an electronic lock and online check-in is beyond me.
There is one thing you can do about it: pay for early check-in. A few thousand yen gets you in before 2pm and out of the queue entirely. Think of it as buying a fast pass and do it.
For dinner we chose the buffet, on the basis that my daughter is a fussy eater. That was a mistake. Not only was the selection small and the food mediocre, the serving area was far too cramped for the number of people crammed into it. My father was on crutches with an injured leg, and the table we were given was a six-seater with a chair jammed on the end to force seven of us in. There was no thought given to any of it.
The dinner venue is behind reception, so anyone in a distant cottage has to drive there too — and there is no restaurant car park, only the few dozen spaces in front of reception, so cars end up stranded with nowhere to go. It is badly run.
The barbecue looked considerably quieter, and in hindsight I wish we had simply eaten in the cottage.
Given all of the above, check-out was predictable. There was the inevitable long queue of people settling their bills, but even those of us who had paid online had to wait while staff individually inspected returned keys. At a normal hotel you drop the card in a box and leave. And of course some of the online check-outs had forgotten to settle the bathing tax, so they started paying at the desk and the whole thing ground to a halt. I could not believe the system.
We will not be going back.
Nasu Highland Park is much less fun in the rain
My daughter loves theme parks and has been to Nasu Highland Park several times. Guests at TOWA Pure Cottage get free park entry and a discount on the day pass.
She had finally passed 130cm, so we arrived determined to ride every roller coaster in the place — and then it rained. A lot of the coasters at Nasu Highland stop running in the rain, so the ones she had her heart set on were closed. That was a genuine disappointment.
Even so: it was a weekend and no attraction had a wait longer than ten minutes. We will be back to the park itself.
So that is TOWA Pure Cottage, right next to Nasu Highland Park. On our next trip to Nasu I will be doing more research to find the place that becomes our regular. Recommendations very welcome.
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