We stayed here for 6 nights to ski the local hills of Kamui, Pippu and Asahidake as we could get shuttles to all. Very well set up, the hotel even has a ski tuning bench including wax and tools, plus a small ski shop. Breakfast is amazing and staff very helpful, but language was a bit challenging. Overall an excellent location to stay in Asahikawa, numerous restaurants to choose from located nearby.
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This hotel may not be ski-in ski-out at a resort, but this is what makes it fantastic because you get a real city experience away from the destination resorts where you may wonder if you’re actually in Japan.

We really enjoyed our time in Asahikawa. It’s a great city and we thoroughly loved heading out to dinner and drinks and exploring the streets and laneways that were in close proximity of the hotel. During the day we hit up little ski areas within an hour drive of the hotel, including Horotachi, Hinata, Wassamu, Kamui and Kamoidake, and got some good powder lines at these local ski hills. We also visited Canmore, but this wasn’t quite our scene.

We’d stayed at this hotel many years ago when it was the Grand Hotel, and Hoshino Resorts has certainly done an excellent job of renovating and modernising the hotel and the aesthetics of the ground floor spaces were particularly lovely. Hoshino Resort has also made it very skier friendly. Nice touches included maps of the nearby ski areas in the lobby, equipment waxing area, and even though we didn’t utilise it as we had a car, the shuttles to a few of the ski areas. It was rather social and there were quite a number of westerners that congregated in the lobby, making the most of the many sofas and other seating areas. The public baths were often busy, but a good way to soak the muscles.

All the staff were Japanese, which is not something you take for granted these days. The staff could speak a little bit of English, which found a nice balance between convenience of service and feeling like we were getting a nice Japanese experience.

The breakfasts were pretty amazing. The food was so beautiful presented and there was a good array of fare on offer. The main speciality items of waffles with smoked salmon and ginger salmon on rice were repeated each day, but both dishes were so good that they were worth repeating.

We stayed in a queen room, which was reasonably modern and it had a seating area to spread out and relax. The bed and bedding were very comfortable and the bathroom did the trick. If we were to dig deep to outline any improvements for the hotel, it would be to add more storage and drying/airing functionality to the rooms for skiers and snowboarders such as hooks, shelving in an open cupboard, or wall shelves.

All in all, this is a great value hotel that makes an excellent base for a Japanese ski experience.
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