Hotel M’s Est Shijo Karasuma, Kyoto, Japan

Hotel M’s Est Shijo Karasuma is a modern hotel near Shijo and Karasuma stations in Kyoto, and it is also now officially the smallest hotel room I’ve ever stayed in, even small than the room I had in Amsterdam last year!

Hotel M's Est Shijo Karasuma, Kyoto, Japan

Check-in was quite fast. You have to pay for the room before they give you your key and you also have to pay the lodging tax separately by putting cash into a vending machine on the check in desk. For my 3 nights I was slugged an extra ¥1200 in tax.

I was then on my way to my room. First impression of the inside of the hotel is that it’s modern.

Enter the room and it too is modern, but very small. I looked for a luggage rack but there is none, which now makes sense as there’s actually nowhere to put it. For the next couple of days I’ll need to resort to opening up the suitcase whenever I needed anything.

To say the room was compact is an understatement. The desk folds down. The chair is stored in a recessed area surrounding the safe.

The bathroom is small. You can touch the other wall while sitting on the crapper, and there’s only a half bath that you could only realistically use as a shower.

There is a window above the bed behind the curtains, but don’t bother opening them as the window is covered with an opaque film so you can’t actually look out. At most you know whether it’s night or day.

Despite the compactness of the room it was functional, but for what I paid I should have gotten something alot larger.

There’s no laundry service here, you need to use the self service laundry on the first floor. Nor is there any room service as far as I could tell, but that didn’t bother me as there were many places to eat within a short walk.