We stayed at the Vessel Inn Sapporo Nakajima Park for seven nights: not the longest we’ve ever spent in a single property – the record belongs to our eight night stay at Pegasus Apart’Hotel in Melbourne 2016 – but it’s close! The short version of this stay: good location with a caveat, room styling is ordinary, and size is a little squeezy. It’s not the best property in an equivalent Japanese city I’ve stayed at before at the same price range, but on the overall the stay was satisfactory. This will be quite a long review that’s past my usual commentary length for properties I stay in, and it’s on account that this Vessel Inn is very highly rated on Tripadvisor and I wanted to be fair in my assessment whether it lives up to that claim.
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We’d initially booked in for a six night stay. But after we dropped our Niseko segment, we applied for an extension of an additional night (the other spare night was going to Hakodate). Oddly, we were unable to use the booking web site – Agoda in this case – to directly make amendments to dates, so had to get Agoda’s customer service’s assistance for that. Of the two properties, Hotel Smile Hakodate readily permitted the extension with no fuss and at the same rate, but not Vessel Inn (Sapporo Nakajima Park). The latter requested a substantially higher rate for the last night. One would have hoped that given the already long stay we’d committed, the hotel would permit the extension at the same rate as goodwill, but nope they would not.
The hotel is very close to the local subway station – its namesake station in fact: Nakajima Park station – and it’s less than a minute walk away. Pro-tip too: enter and exit the station via entrance #2: it’s literally just behind the hotel. The hotel’s super close proximity to the train station is a huge plus: this station also doesn’t see a lot of commuters getting off and onboard. However, it also means that if you’re heading towards Sapporo Station each morning for your day’s itinerary, you’d be squeezing in with everybody else heading to work in that direction, with Odori Park and Sapporo Stations themselves being where the lines cross.
There are just a small handful of restaurants in the immediate vicinity of the hotel: an Italian restaurant, three Ramen joints (or so) – and that’s it. The large numbers of dining establishments are all clustered from the Susukino area onwards, and that involves at least six minutes of walking. Most seriously: be prepared to eat the daily subway fare between Nakajima Park and Sapporo Stations. For the four of us, it cost us ¥1,200/SGD15 for a roundabout trip just to make our way to find dinner at some decent places in Sapporo Station and back. This kind of cost really adds up fast to your transportation expenses.
The other option when it comes to makan is just to take-out ready made food. If that’s an option for you, then you’d be relieved to know that there are three convenience stores all within 1-2 minutes walk of the hotel. Two Lawsons are directly in front of you when you exit the hotel: across the road, one your left and the other on your right. And if you want a bit more variety, there’s a Seicomart convenience store on the side of the hotel just another minute walk further down.
Nakajima Park also seems home to a large number of mid priced hotels: I didn’t do a hard count, but I reckon there are perhaps six all clustered together and eyeballing each other, including some that look a lot smaller than Vessel Inn, and one at least – Sapporo Park Hotel – which looked huge and grand.
What was most interesting to me was Vessel Inn’s very high Tripadvisor rating. I reckon the #1 rating in fact played no small part to elevating my expectations of the rooms, amenities and also dining. The actual experience was quite mixed: the room – a Double – was small – but we could accept that since there were four of us in it. But the decor and styling is something else: it was bland with little attempt at cheering the place up, whether it’s in terms of use of aesthetic carpentry and woodwork, or even color palette. I guess if you’re just doing a short stay, this wouldn’t matter much – but it did for me for a seven night stay.
Sleep quality was OK, but nothing fantastic. The pillow is of an unusual design, and its internals comprise two different types of filler material, and thus supporting different sleeping postures.
Of amenities: there was a fairly large flat-screen TV – 50” is my guess – with a large number of cable channels, but nothing international. So, either you learn Japanese if you want to be entertained with what’s on the telly, or you look elsewhere to bide your nights away. There oddly weren’t any built-in USB charging ports in the room – something I’ve come to expect in Japanese hotels as two of the four properties I stayed during the September trip had them in the rooms. The most well-used amenity for us though was the complimentary beverage corner on the ground floor – operating hours are 2PM to 11PM everyday – and we really availed ourselves of that. The wife for instance would make 2-3 coffee runs every evening just to get her fix haha.
In-room Internet is a little iffy. The four devices – two handphones, one tablet and one laptop – were able to connect to WIFI easily enough, but there were occasional disconnects, and also frequent slow-downs. When it did work, it was speedy – enough at least for me to upload the close to about 25GB average of 4K video every evening to YouTube.
Unlike Hotel Mystays Haneda which is an ‘eco’ hotel i.e. it cuts down on house-keeping and default laundry replacement arrangements, there’s housekeeping everyday at Vessel Inn. I observed thought that the housekeepers routinely did not touch i.e. tidy-up personal effects, whether it’s apparel, cables used for electronic gadgets, or the toiletries we brought over from Singapore for use on the trip. No, I wasn’t expecting our personal items to be tidied up – but I wanted to point out that in some properties we’ve stayed, house-keeping will do so. This hotel doesn’t.
There’s an in-hotel laundromat, with separate machines for washers and dryers. They are coin-operated and not on the house, unlike Hotel Mystays Haneda. These machines also seem to be quite heavily used, so I advise giving yourself that bit of time allowance if you have urgent stuff to wash.
And finally, the much talked about buffet breakfast that many, many Tripadvisors rave about. The good bits: there is a decent range, so if you’re one of those eaters who want little bits of every item type, the breakfast buffet spread won’t disappoint you. If you’re hoping for one or two signature items for your palette though, you might not find it. The food items were alright, but – aside from a pot of beef stew which was quite good but it only showed up on one of the seven days we had breakfast – I was hard pressed to find any standout item in the spread. The hours of operation are from 6:30AM to 9:30AM every morning: kinda late especially for winter and its shorter days. The other Japanese hotels I visited started their breakfast usually at 6AM if not earlier. On the other hand, there’s more than sufficient seating capacity, and tables get cleared and readied again speedily.
So, in all, my summary feel of this property and Is it deserving of its ranking on Tripadvisor? That’s the problematic part for me, and I don’t think it is. Vessel Inn Sapporo Nakajima Park is good – just not great, and a property that sits at the top of Tripadvisor traveler ratings really needs to be even better than this. Though then again, if you care nothing about ratings and want only a comfortable stay, then this place is still worth checking out. It’s decent and alright, good access to the subway with the larger caveat of it being four stops from the city central, and finally supported by a sumptuous but not particularly fantastic breakfast.
My review of Hotel Smile Hakodate next!
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