## Location
Starting from Hakodate in the morning, we checked into this Hilton in Niseko, using it as a base for a day trip to Shakotan Peninsula and Cape Kamui. The hotel is located in the Hirafu area, making it very convenient to drive to View Plaza, Takahashi Farm, and the Hirafu village gondola area. It's a well-established five-star ski hotel in the core Niseko resort area.
## Staff
A high percentage of the staff across various departments are of South Asian descent. They are generally warm and polite, with fluent English, though slightly accented. Slowing down your speech makes for smooth communication. The check-out process is a bit cumbersome, typical of older resort hotels with more procedures. During check-out, staff proactively ask about your onward travel plans and even print out formal accommodation tax receipts in an envelope.
## Dining (Both breakfast and dinner buffets require reservations)
The buffet restaurant is enormous, a standard for a five-star hotel, with an extensive variety of dishes. However, both breakfast and dinner have a distinct Southeast Asian flavor that we found rather peculiar and not particularly tasty.
It's essential to book your dining slots for both breakfast and dinner in advance, as it can be difficult to get a table if you try to book last minute. We recommend booking as soon as you check in. The restaurant gets very busy, with many Korean tour groups, and the public areas can occasionally be a bit noisy.
## Room Experience
We booked two deluxe rooms, one king and one family room. The rooms were exceptionally spacious, a rare find in Japanese hotels, and offered great value for money at just over 1,000 yuan (approximately $150 USD) per night during the summer.
• The rooms have been renovated, and the air conditioning is comfortably cool. The oversized panoramic windows offer superb mountain views, directly overlooking the golf course (which becomes the ski slope in winter).
• The layout features a separate wet and dry area, with the washbasin located outside the bathroom. However, the toilet area itself is on the smaller side and hasn't been renovated, looking a bit old and cramped.
• We requested high-floor, quiet rooms in advance. Our two rooms were located at the near ends of the corridors on either side of the elevator (avoiding corner rooms). The hotel's corridors are curved and extremely long, making daily trips to the restaurant and onsen quite a walk and physically demanding.
• Hairdryers are not provided in the rooms; guests must use them in the onsen area. The onsen changing room only has two hairdryer stations, which are underpowered and make it difficult to dry hair, often resulting in queues.
• Two bottles of drinking water with good packaging quality are provided daily in the room.
## Public Onsen & Shortcomings
The onsen facilities don't quite match a five-star rating. The overall size of the pools is relatively small, and the shower/changing area is cramped. The lockers and storage designs are very basic, a noticeable contrast compared to the several Japanese onsen ryokans we stayed at on this trip.
The hotel lobby is grand and spacious with high ceilings, and its red decor gives it an impressive feel. There's a small souvenir shop on-site with reasonable prices, not overly inflated.
## Overall Summary
This is a classic, well-run five-star resort hotel with an impressive lobby, huge guest rooms, and excellent views. It offers great value for summer stays and is a popular ski accommodation in winter. Its strengths include warm staff, a convenient location, and spacious, quiet rooms. The drawbacks are the peculiar-tasting food that requires advance reservations, somewhat subpar onsen facilities, the lack of in-room hairdryers requiring queuing in the public area, the long and tiring walks along the corridors, and a slight sense of noise due to tour groups. Overall, the experience doesn't quite measure up to some of the smaller, more niche Japanese ryokans.
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