Originally Posted by
jiajin
In fact, your comment about the shoes exactly proves my point. The taking off of shoes is not an "interesting twist", or some cultural ceremony like a welcome dance at a safari camp. It isn't even an inconvenience in a Japanese context, because your shoes either come off at the front door (homes, ryokans, old restaurants with tatami mats), or the first thing upon opening the door of one's hotel room anyway. The fact that such an everyday habit is a negative point at all, along with the lack of gym, really shows that we are trying to evaluate a ryokan by western expectations, which seems slightly unfair.
I happen to come from a shoes-off culture so the act of taking shoes off at the entrance of a house or restaurant is not at all new to me. I suspect, however, that taking off shoes at the entrance of a 19-storey hotel with 84 rooms is probably an "interesting twist", even in Japan.
If they wanted to provide the "ryokan experience" with this arrangement in a hotel that is probably too large for it, they should do so seamlessly. In practice, I found that 1. they don't memorise your room number (at least not everyone's) so it was a minor annoyance to have to give your room number every time you arrived or departed, 2. it was not straightforward to manage different pairs of shoes for multiple people in the same room, and 3. during certain times, the person in charge of shoes was not by the door, and having to call for someone just to store/retrieve your shoes felt like I was being a nuisance. That was the negative part, rather than the act of taking one's shoes off at the entrance.
The gym comment was simply an example to illustrate that it has very minimal facilities, to ensure that one does not book it thinking that it is comparable to other conventional luxury hotels with the full range of facilities you would normally expect, as at least one poster may have been on the cusp of doing.