Paid ¥6,600 to upgrade from a stained room — to an even more stained one
We stayed for two nights as a party of three. We chose Hotel Hankyu RESPIRE Osaka partly because Hankyu is a major Japanese railway group, so we expected a dependable standard of cleanliness and service. Unfortunately, this stay rather efficiently corrected that assumption. There was initially an issue concerning the description of our Universal Triple Room, but this was promptly handled by Trip.com, so I will not dwell on it here. The real problem was cleanliness and the hotel’s handling of it.
Our original room had visible stains on the bedding and marks in the bathroom area. After we raised our concerns, the hotel offered us a Deluxe Triple Room but required us to pay an additional JPY 6,600 for the “upgrade”. We paid, assuming that a replacement room provided after a cleanliness complaint would at least have been checked for cleanliness. Instead, after packing our belongings and moving from the 24th floor down to the 15th floor, we found an even larger visible stain on the bedding in the Deluxe room. There is a certain irony in paying extra to upgrade from a stained room to a more obviously stained one. It was certainly one of the more memorable hotel upgrades we have experienced.
We photographed the stain and reported it promptly through Trip.com. By then, we had already spent a considerable amount of our holiday dealing with the problem, waiting for responses, packing and changing rooms, and we were checking out the following day. We had no desire to pack everything again and try a third room. We therefore requested only a refund of the JPY 6,600 upgrade fee, not a refund of our accommodation. The hotel declined, apparently because we had already occupied the Deluxe room. This is an interesting argument, since it would have been rather difficult to discover the stain without first entering the room.
The location is excellent and the hotel makes an attractive first impression, but neither compensates for poor housekeeping and ineffective service recovery. We were not expecting luxury; we expected a clean room and competent handling when something went wrong. Instead, a cleanliness complaint resulted in us paying extra, moving to a lower floor, and receiving a replacement room with an even larger stain. After returning home, we decided that we had already spent enough of our holiday dealing with this matter. The JPY 6,600 is no longer worth any more of our time. For a hotel carrying the Hankyu name, we expected much better. We would not stay here again.
