Shiki wo Ajiwau Yado Yamano Chaya

It was a lovely place with an amazing onsen. The staff were also very friendly and helpful and made the experience better. I’d like to thank Kwon for all his assistance!

Yama No Chaya has its own beauty and serenity. I personally don’t find it hard to locate - 2 bus stops away from Hakone Yumoto station + a 5 minutes walk are worth the stay. (Bus service stopped for one of the days due to bad weather and we walked for 20 minutes to Hakone Yumoto Station - all good) The team is very hospitable - they also have some English and Chinese speaking staff otherwise simple English is not an issue to communicate. Our butler - Sandip always carry a smile with him, and he ensured we are very well taken care of. Every morning, the team will prepare heat pack and umbrellas for us (it was raining and snowing). In the evening, they made tea and prepared snacks (vary from mochi to sushi) for us upon our returned. The room we booked is Yamano Ichigo (main wing) - just nice for 2. The viewing platform was where we relaxed every evening and we soaked our tiredness away in our very own private onsen at the basement. Despite of having our own private onsen, I still went to visit 3 other public onsen within the Ryokan - you will not be disappointed. Our room came with daily breakfast and we added on dinner for 1 night. I must say the chef and culinary team put in their passion and effort to prepare all the dishes. It’s not common for a visitor like me to taste Kaisekai cuisine which I enjoyed very much. You need to take time and an empty stomach to full experience it :) However, my partner and I weren’t used to heavy breakfast and our butler noticed it - we get to change to western style for the rest of the stay which was equally delicious. We are thankful that we minimised food wastage. Overall, we felt pampered during our stay at Yama no Chaya :) I will return again in the future when I visit Hakone.

Wonderful experience in this quite and pretty ryokan

So far so good, staffs are super nice while there are rooms of improvement on hygiene

Overall an ok stay. A bit hard to find, very limited English spoken by the staff which led to some confusion (even for the representatives who were assigned to us by English speakers). Felt quite formal and not that warm Room was more or less as expected, and the dinner and breakfast meals were quite elaborate. Felt that breakfast was actually the stronger meal of the two, so wasn’t necessarily worth it to pay extra for dinner. I’d likely skip doing dinner in the future. The room attendant who helped us was very kind and attentive, although we had a bit of language barrier given we don’t speak Japanese. The big disappointment was even though the ryokan is advertised as allowing guests to book one of the larger hot springs on the property for private use for 45 minutes, we weren’t able to do this. We arrived within the designated check in time and were told that it was all booked up for the day. There was no way to book in advance and we were only staying for one night, and they didn’t try to accommodate allowing us to book at all for the next day before checkout. This really hampered the experience overall - we weren’t that interested in using the gender segregated facility (was traveling with my partner who is the opposite gender) as we wouldn’t be able to spend time together, and the tub in our room was quite small. They should amend this policy to allow all guests to book a private hot spring time or not advertise it as part of the room! Feels like we got cheated out of the service and we weren’t offered anything else as an alternative. I would have booked another ryokan had I known this were the case - there are many others in Hakone which are much better value and have nicer / newer private facilities for around the same price. I wouldn’t recommend Yama no Chaya given this was a big part of what we thought would make it a good experience