Big Family Challenges - the hotel policies

I have previously written about how we keep accommodation costs down on family trips, and most of the strategies still hold - to a point. But things have changed. Accommodation prices have climbed noticeably over the last three years, and our family dynamic has shifted too. By hotel policy, we now have three “adult” children, which means we’re booking for five adults and one child. Finding a single room, or even two reasonably priced rooms, has become much more difficult.

On our most recent trip, we wanted to stay in a hotel, but we didn’t have the time to hunt for our usual budget‑friendly options. And with it being Obon, the best choices had already been snapped up. We also didn’t have the luxury of researching cabins or cottages, which are normally a great fit for our “big” (by Japanese standards) family. So it quickly became a matter of ringing around hotels and seeing what was still available.

At first, everything looked promising. We even found a couple of places that seemed to fit our budget. But that was only because we made the mistake of searching for “4 adults and 2 children,” assuming our two senior‑school students counted as adults while our junior‑high and elementary‑aged kids counted as children. I was quickly reminded that, in Japan, anyone over the age of twelve is considered an adult. Fair enough, it’s a fairly global standard, but Japan’s hotel policies tend to be firm, with far less flexibility than you might find in many European countries.

Once we corrected the ages, the real challenge became clear. Most booking sites simply don’t allow searches for three adults in the same room; the system is fixed at two. Even when we called hotels directly, the moment we mentioned our children’s ages, we were met with a polite but definitive “muzukashi.” In practice, the policy is two adults per room, regardless of whether a larger room could physically accommodate more. It made finding suitable accommodation surprisingly difficult.

Photo: a hotel room we stayed in back in 2019, a space that could still comfortably fit our family in 2026, yet by hotel policy we can no longer book