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 RISONARE Tomamu in Hokkaido: a spectacular building with a service problem.
Book Hoshino Resorts RISONARE Tomamu
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Getting there from the airport
Taxi, bus, hire car, train — there appear to be options, but for Tomamu I think the train is the only sensible choice:
- It is the fastest
- It is the cheapest
- There is roughly one an hour
- The resort is so self-contained that you will barely leave it, so you do not need a car once you arn there
One catch: you must book in advance, because you cannot buy the return at the station on the day.
The stressful part is the outbound leg, because you are booking a train while watching a flight that may be late. My rule of thumb: assume the flight runs about fifteen minutes behind, and book a train from New Chitose for roughly an hour after scheduled arrival. If you have no checked bags, or you are travelling without children and can run, you can cut it finer. RISONARE collects you from Tomamu station and no booking is needed for that.
The room and the building
I went back and forth between RISONARE and The Tower and chose RISONARE. The deciding factor was that The Tower has unit bathrooms and, as I understand it, no walkable access to the communal baths.
The RISONARE room was excellent: enormous, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom with a large jet bath and a sauna.
But check-in was a shambles and we waited a very long time. This is not unique to Tomamu — it is standard across Hoshino Resorts properties in my experience. The same is true at the buffet restaurants and elsewhere. It is not that individual staff lack care or skill; it is that there are plainly too few of them for the number of guests, which makes me think it is a management decision. The atmosphere is of people with no time to offer hospitality because they are overwhelmed simply getting through the work. I would like to see that change.
I also noticed the buildings ageing this time. My daughter was playing in the kids’ space and got a splinter from a spot where the wood — the flooring, or part of a wall — had lifted, and was in tears. The bathrooms and plumbing feel dated too.
There is a lounge with tea and snacks. I was less impressed by some of the other guests — one of them was decanting the entire drinks selection into a flask to take away.
Restaurants
Most cannot be booked, but SORA, Grilled Age and OTTO SETTE can — and those bookings are fiercely contested, so reserve as soon as you have booked the room. The website says one month ahead; in practice the slots seem to open earlier. I looked exactly one month before and it was almost entirely full; I got Grilled Age by picking up a cancellation.
The other trap is breakfast. It cannot be booked before you arrive, but two restaurants — SORA and Grilled Age — can be booked once you have checked in, and guests staying multiple nights appear to take the slots first. Book at the moment you check in. SORA seemed to fill first. The unbookable buffets are fine if you go early.
Night one: Nininupuri
A buffet restaurant within walking distance of RISONARE. We arrived as it opened and walked straight in. Freshly baked pizza is the selling point and it is made in front of you; that and the beef steak from the live kitchen were the highlights.
What stuck with me was not the food but the staffing. By the time we went to pay, the desk had a long queue. I was not going to push in, so I joined it — only to be pointed towards a different spot where there was no member of staff at all, and then to wait there while nobody came. It was a thoroughly unpleasant end to the meal.
Night two: Grilled Age
Teppanyaki on one of the upper floors of RISONARE. The food, the room and the service were all excellent. You do not need the full course — a la carte would work well too. The prawns, the abalone and the sirloin were all cooked and seasoned beautifully.
Breakfast, day one: Grilled Age
We ate here for both dinner and breakfast and were delighted both times. Breakfast is a half-buffet with four mains to choose from; I had the beef stew. They come round with freshly baked bread from time to time, which is a lovely touch — the croissants straight from the oven were superb.
Breakfast, day two: SORA
Also a half-buffet. I chose the assorted sashimi as my main. From the buffet, the scallop isobe-age and the miso soup were outstanding. The seating is semi-private, which makes it easy with small children.
Other places to eat
We had lunch on Hotalu Street, the restaurant row near RISONARE that you can walk into in your ski boots. I was in the mood for a cafe but my daughter insisted on ramen, so we went to Takezo. There is a good range — miso, soy, seafood — plus gyoza, fried rice and a few other Chinese dishes. It had the longest queue on Hotalu Street and we waited perhaps twenty to thirty minutes. It looked busy at every hour of the day.
The gondola base area is a food court, heavy on meat — pork bowls, karaage. The chicken skin karaage was excellent. It is very busy, so expect to queue a little.
At the top of the gondola there is Cloud Cafe. I was drawn in by the menu and had a white cocoa with marshmallows. The taste is ordinary and the look is lovely. Plenty of people were up there in ordinary clothes rather than ski gear, so you can visit without skiing.
Activities
Skiing first. Both RISONARE and The Tower are ski-in ski-out, which is enormously convenient — though unlike Appi or Park Hyatt Niseko there is no valet service, so you handle and store your own gear.
The runs skew towards beginners, and the better skiers were mostly on the jumps and features. With that many beginners, some of the narrower sections get chaotic, and there are people on snow carts in the mix too. Intermediate and above runs were noticeably quiet.
You can ski and lift between the two mountains — the RISONARE side and The Tower side — so three days did not run out of terrain.
The other headline facility is Mina-Mina Beach, an indoor wave pool. The waves run twice an hour and it was never crowded, so it was thoroughly enjoyable. You can also do SUP in the same place; my daughter decided she was Moana and became completely obsessed. The water is on the cool side but the air temperature is kept warm, so one to two hours is comfortable. It is a bus ride from RISONARE, four an hour, so keep an eye on the timetable.
Within the RISONARE group, I would place Tomamu above Nasu and below Yatsugatake. The building is magnificent and the service problem is entirely solvable, so I hope they solve it.
Book Hoshino Resorts RISONARE Tomamu
Check rates and availability on Agoda
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