Sarasa Hotel Shin-Osaka

The Good: Excellent location - very close to the Shin-Osaka metro (about 5 min). A 10 min walk to the JR Shin-Osaka station where there is also a shopping area. A lot of nice food and combinis nearby. Two of the front desk staff were really service-oriented, one Chinese staffer allowing for luggage to be kept earlier than my stay (thank you!) and also a young Japanese staffer who was thoughtful and kind, attentive to the guests at the elevator.  The OK: The laundry team is doing its job well - the sheets, pajamas and towels were clean (which is why the cleanliness score is a 2 rather than a 1 - see The Bad below). The other front desk staff did respond to queries with appropriate responses. There is a laundry room with two machines for the entire hotel, on the ground floor; similarly there is one microwave for the entire hotel, on the ground floor. I suppose they are functional enough, but I wish there were more facilities and not in such a public area.  The Bad: The hygiene and cleanliness were terrible for a Japanese hotel standard. Gross stains on the room floor and room walls, some gross sticky substance (looked like snot) and someone's leftover hair on the bathroom wall. The trashcan also had a sticky substance still on it. How is this acceptable?? The room slippers were unlikely to have been sanitised - one of them still had a really long hair stuck to it. Their way of "changing" room slippers is to put an ill-fitting thin pad on top of these unsanitised slippers. Really mind-boggling. The TV remote had so much dust on it, and the phone had gross stains on it - neither looked sanitised at all either. I had to clean up my own room to make it liveable for my time staying there. I'm sharing a few photos here, but these are only a percentage of what was really unsanitary about the room. Also, feedback about the poor cleanliness was given to the front desk and written on Google, but neither the front desk nor anyone on Google (say their PR or management team) offered to do any form of service recovery. The other front desk staff often engaged in their own chitchat even while guests approached. 

It is our first mother and son vacation to Japan and Sarasa Hotel Shin-Ōsaka is the hotel I chose after going through so many other choices because of its location.  The hotel room we stayed is of a decent size because we have anticipated it to be small due to the country's high population density.  So we are comfortable with it.  The bathroom is of a decent size and I love the shower pressure.  Not to mentioned my son was literally soaking himself in the bathtub every time when he shower.  I have used their laundry machine twice and twice the machines were occupied with one still running and another done but the user didn’t pickup their cleaned laundry. So I have to seek help from the front desk and they were helpful.  I need to wait for 10 minutes before the hotel staff could remove the cleaned laundry from the machine, which is their protocol, so I could use it, not knowing that I was just waiting around the lobby, the staff went up to our room wanting to inform me that she has free up the laundry machine.  I was impressed because I didn’t reveal to her my room number but she knows.  I will definitely choose to stay in this hotel if I am coming to Shin-Ōsaka again.

There are only two washing machines which always busy and dryers don't work properly