Ryokan Sumiya Kihoan

Took the complimentary shuttle bus from JR Kamaeoka station provided by the Ryokan. Upon arrival, I was warmly welcomed by someone who personally attended to me and brought me to my room. I selected the room package that came with dinner as well as breakfast and they were all served in-room. Food was really good and fresh and again I was being attended to during the meals. The ryokan also had an outdoor and indoor onsen and although it wasnt very big but it was good enough as the ryokan doesnt accomodate many rooms as well hence there wasnt any crowd for the onsen. Overall, i had a good stay and I believe its a must-go if visiting Kyoto.

有中文服務員，服務態度非常好，住宿舒適，溫泉人很少很舒服。食物也不錯，懷石料理賣相非常精緻。周邊環境很好，已經有火紅楓葉，非常美麗。唯一不足的是發email預約接送車服務沒有收到回覆，但上官網留言還是會有回覆的。

If you are looking for a traditional ryokan experience, Sumiya Kiho-an will check all of your boxes. From private onsen (hot spring baths) attached to your room (highly recommended) to an amazing kaiseki (seasonal Japanese tasting menu), this ryokan will cover all of your bases. I would give closer to 4.5 stars because, besides the activities at the hotel, you are somewhat isolated from other areas. However, if you are looking for a short stay, this is definitely the place for you. The food alone is worth every cent!

A very welcoming Ryokan within a fairly easy travelling distance to Kyoto city. My family loved the onsen and also the fact there was an outdoor swimming pool. All the staff were very friendly, room was very nice and I would definitely stay again.

I loved everything about this ryokan. The staff were all amazing polite, the onsen was clean and comfortable, and the rooms were spacious and clean. I would recommend this place to anyone!

One of the best onsen hotel that we have ever stayed in Japan. I would recommend everyone to stay at least one night of accommodation in onsen hotel such as Sumiya Rokyan to experience Japanese onsen and the traditional Kaiseki dinner. Value for money!

amazing experience - friendly staff, the place is super comfortable. the secret onsen and the food were nice - worth a try.

We stayed in the Honami room on the 12th of April 2017. The following texts in “xxx” are notes I took on the night of my stay to help me not miss any important points in my review. “So I am typing this up in the ryokan during the night of our stay (after dinner). So far, we are disappointed, to say the least. Let's wind back time a bit to give you a bit of background of our stay. We were staying at Gion, Kyoto for 2 nights prior, in a fabulous ryokan (check out my other review). We checked out from the Gion ryokan earlier today and were very sad to leave. Caught the JR line to Kameoka Station as advised on the Sumiya website. Train was packed until we reach the start of the Romance (or sightseeing) train line. Once we got to Kameoka Station, we started to feel hungry and decided, let's go to Sumiya 1st and find something to eat around there. We took the taxi as advised on the ryokan’s website. We arrived at the property and went into the lobby. We tried out luck to check in even though it was only 12.30pm (check in time is at 3pm). They told us the rooms are not ready yet, which we totally understand. We asked them whether there were anything close by that we can kill some time with or some good eateries nearby. The front desk said nothing much around. He didn't offer any suggestions or invite us to the on property restaurant. We went outside the property and looked up Google. Everything was a few miles away. We went back in and ask them whether they serve lunch. The lady said she will find out and get back to me. She later invited and escorted us to the dining place down 1 level from the lobby. We ordered lunch. My wild boar rice was good. Wife's tempura udon was lack lustre. We finished lunch and went back to lobby. They offered us tea. After 15 or so minutes, they invited us to the library area to wait (They told us it was a nicer area to wait in). They reminded us Wifi is free and can be used. The room was ready at 2pm. We checked in and were escorted to our room.” We were told that this is the largest room on the property. Our room was indeed massive. The front door opens to a large typical Japanese foyer, where you remove your shoes. Then it either opens to the main dining area (centre of the room) or to the side – a Japanese living room (There is a restroom next to it). Next to the living room facing the windows/view was the hotspring/onsen bath for legs only. It was intended that you can sit here relaxing your legs in hotspring water while admiring the view. On the other side of the dining area was our room, a second restroom and the onsen bath and shower area. We also paid an additional 3240 yen for a 45-minute private use of their “secret open air onsen”. Consistent with other reviews already here, we had to walk around 10 minutes on an outdoor trail to the secret onsen. Fortunately, compared to other reviews, we had booked our session to be around 4/5pm so there was still daylight. The outdoor onsen was not bad, we had the place to ourselves. The onsen water was a bit too warm for us so we could not stay too long in the water. When we got out of the water and got dressed, we were nice and toasty (it was rather chilly before getting into the water). We lazed around on the lounge chairs for a while (as we still had left over time) before making our way back to the main building. The air-conditioning in our room was not customisable. We read the room info in the form of a leaflet that we were not to change the operating modes but we had to switch it from the heating cycle to the fan cycle as it was too warm for us. Ideally we would have liked a cooling cycle but the a/c unit doesn’t allow us to do so. So it was a warm night and we had to open up the windows to cool our rooms. We did not have a great night’s sleep. We had breakfast early and left early (before 9pm) to catch the train to Tokyo. At that moment in time, we were very disappointed with the stay. We couldn’t wait to leave. Now, after a few weeks, I have calmed down a bit and am trying to be a bit more objective. Our main bug bear is: From the website, we had imagined that the place would be nice and quiet, secluded, peaceful. Photos on the website, intentionally or unintentionally, misled us to believe this. Or you could say that we were naïve and did not look up Google maps or read the bad reviews more carefully on Tripadvisor, for example. The property was alongside a busy motorway/highway. View from the room was this motorway. Not a very peaceful, scenic or relaxing image. Same with the private onsen. Pictures on their website look wonderful. I will give them a bit of slack on it being the start of spring but yeah not relaxing or scenic at all. Being near the motorway did not help. I suppose we had very high expectation coming to this property. We had a superb stay at the Gion ryokan (best in our lives) so that set the bar unreasonably high. We paid 20-25% more for our stay at Sumiya (I understand it is a very very large room) compared to the previous ryokan. So we were expecting somewhat 70-80% of the satisfaction of our previous night’s stay at the Gion ryokan. All these factors led us to be utterly disappointed. If you only speak English, good luck. One person at the front desk speak some English. One person at the restaurant understood English. The rest of the staff during our stay were struggling to communicate in English. I do admit, we have no right to expect everyone to understand English when we travel to a foreign country so it is not entirely their fault. We speak no Japanese and speak some Mandarin. So fortunately there was a staff that spoke Mandarin, who was allocated to serve us on the 1st day. All in all it was an average stay but we had high expectations partly because of the previous stay and the high price. Biggest no no for us was the location next to the highway. If you want a peaceful a quiet stay in a ryokan with onsen, my personal 2 cents is to try somewhere else. Note: This is in no way a finger pointing review, which says the property is at fault and we had no responsibility in our disappointment. It is just a review and our personal opinion. We may have visited not at the best time or state of mind. Just thought some of the points would be helpful for others in making the choice of staying. The property offers a day visit to use their onsen too. That may have been a better choice for us.

We have never visited Japan. Based on input from our friends, we chose to visit Kyoto due to the colourful history. Indeed, it was memorable for us even though it was a short visit (4 days 3 nights). We chose to stay at the Sumiya Kiho-an in Kameoka due to its location that is on the mountain side, about 45 minutes from Kyoto City away from the busy areas due to Easter. The service at the Sumiya exceeded our expectations. We selected the Japanese style room because the website at the time did not provide details about the other rooms. We think that next time we'll choose Seiyu instead which is combination of western beds and Japanese style living room. The Onsen bath was located outside and there was an enclosed sun room from the living room. The view from the sunroom was the mountain. One morning we saw a deer looking for food. The Sumiya package include breakfast and dinner served in the dining room. Yoko served us during the 4 days. She was polite, English speaking and answered our many questions about the food being served. We had the choice of the Chef's 10-course dinner, which varies daily or Sukiyaki. The Chef's dinner special was a daily surprise but most interesting and delicious. We chose Beef Sukiyaki on one night and the Chef's special on other nights. For breakfast, there's a choice of Western or Japanese style. Both were equally delicious. Lunch is not part of the package and is not normally served. However, we did not go touring on one of the days and the resort was quite accommodating serving us lunch on that day. We had the choice of tempura udon or rice with pork. We chose the former, which was quite tasty with shrimp and assorted vegetable tempura. The tempura was moist and not oily. The dining room had beautiful landscape from the dining tables. My husband was delighted to see a crane walking along the stream at the side of the hotel. We did not use the male and female public baths so cannot comment. We hope to return to the Sumiya.

The hotel is far away from JR station but it offer shuttle bus service. You can also take public bus to the hotel if you prefer a more flexible time but not recommend because the frequency of the bus is low. The team line up to welcome us, it is very japanese style and you can feel the professional and hospitality they take pride in. I book a room with private onsen. The room is very spacious. But the view of the onsen was not particularly spectacular. If i book this hotel next time, perhaps i will book a normal guest room and separately book a section of their secret onsen. You need to walk a path to get into the secret onsen and its ambience was terrific especially in the magic hours. The staff is friendly and helpful. They can speak limited English which made a small confusion when i had the dinner. No scenic spot around the hotel. A good place for meditation.