Staying at a ryokan in Japan: what it costs, what a night is like, how the bath works and where first-timers should book one

What is a ryokan?

A ryokan is a Japanese-style inn. The Japan National Tourism Organization calls ryokan "potentially the oldest form of hotel in the world" and says they "are said to date back to the 8th century"; what you get today is remarkably consistent from one inn to the next. JNTO's own list of the common elements is "tatami flooring, futon bedding, private baths (sometimes outdoor), yukata robes, sumptuous in-house kaiseki multi-course dinners, and a traditional Japanese breakfast."

Three things separate a ryokan from a hotel, and they explain almost everything else in this guide:

• The room is a floor, not a bedroom. JNTO's accommodation page explains that rooms "usually consist of a single, undivided tatami-mat space and guests sleep on futon bedding." The futon are laid out by staff in the evening and put away in the morning, so the same room is a sitting room by day and a bedroom by night.
• The price is per person and includes the food. "Room rates are usually charged per person inclusive of two meals: dinner and breakfast," JNTO says, and "most ryokan serve kaiseki (Japanese banquet) cuisine that feature local and seasonal specialties." A ryokan is as much a restaurant as a place to sleep.
• The bath is the point. Ryokan are "found throughout the country, especially in onsen (hot spring) resorts," and the evening bath before dinner, with a yukata to wear afterwards, is the ritual the whole stay is built around.

Visitors clearly want this. In the Japan Tourism Agency's 2025 survey, 33.5% of all foreign visitors said a ryokan stay was something they wanted to do on their next trip, and the English-speaking markets wanted it most: 61.1% of British visitors, 52.0% of Americans, 49.0% of Canadians and 46.1% of Australians. Far fewer had actually done it. Asked which accommodation they had used on the trip just ending, 85.2% said a Western-style hotel and 13.0% a ryokan (14.9% of Americans, 18.9% of Britons, 20.0% of Australians). The gap is mostly cost and uncertainty, which is what the rest of this page is for.

How much does a ryokan cost?

Start from JNTO's figure: "The average price of a ryokan stay hovers around the 15,000 yen per night mark, but at high-end establishments prices will charge more." That is per person, and in most cases it includes dinner and breakfast. JNTO's Australian office gives the spread rather than the average, grouping minshuku and ryokan into bands from "Budget: $70–100 AUD per person, per night" up to "Luxury: $500~ AUD per person, per night", and notes that many Japanese-style lodgings "include two meals, dinner and breakfast". Convert those bands into your own currency on the day you book; this site does not.

Because the price is per person, the headline figure doubles for a couple and quadruples for a family of four, which is the sticker shock most first-timers feel when they compare a ryokan with a hotel room priced per night. Compare like with like: a ryokan night includes a dinner that would cost a good deal in a restaurant, and a breakfast on top. Judged as room plus two meals, a mid-range ryokan is often no dearer than a city hotel plus eating out.

What moves the price:

• Meals. "Sudomari" (room only) and one-meal plans exist at many inns and are far cheaper. They also remove the main reason to be there, so use them for a second night or when you have dinner plans in town.
• The bath in your room. A room with its own open-air bath (rotenburo) is the most expensive category at almost every inn, and the one tattooed guests and shy bathers pay for gladly.
• The calendar. Saturdays, Japanese public holidays, Golden Week, Obon in mid-August, New Year and the autumn-leaf weeks in Kyoto cost more and sell out first. Weeknights are cheapest.
• The place. Hakone, Kyoto and the famous onsen towns sit at the top of the market. Lesser-known hot-spring towns offer the same routine for less.
• Local taxes at check-out. Hot-spring inns collect a municipal bathing tax, 150 yen per person per day at the standard rate, and some cities add an accommodation tax that booking sites rarely include: Kyoto city, for example, has charged between 200 and 10,000 yen per person per night, depending on the room rate, since 1 March 2026. The amounts for each city are in our accommodation tax guide.

Two money habits help. Book with the exact number of guests, including children, because meals are prepared per head and the price changes with the count. And read the cancellation terms: because an inn buys and prepares your dinner, cancellation fees often start earlier and bite harder than a hotel's.

Ryokan or onsen: what is the difference?

The two words get mixed up in searches because they so often appear together. An onsen is a natural hot spring and, by extension, the bath fed by one and the town built around it. A ryokan is an inn. An onsen ryokan is an inn with its own hot-spring bath, which is what most people picture when they say "ryokan". But the overlap is not complete:

• There are ryokan without onsen, especially in Kyoto and other cities, where the bath is ordinary heated water and the draw is the house, the garden and the food.
• There are onsen without ryokan: public bath houses, day-use baths in hot-spring towns, and large resort hotels with Western rooms and a hot-spring bath downstairs. Many business-hotel chains add a communal bath too, though usually not a natural spring.

So the question "ryokan or onsen?" is really "is the bath the point, or the inn?" If it is the bath, choose a hot-spring town and almost any inn there will do; if you want to bathe but sleep in a bed, a resort hotel in the same town gives you the spring without the futon. If it is the inn, a Kyoto ryokan with a plain bath is the fuller cultural experience, and you can visit a public onsen or sento separately.

What a night at a ryokan is like

Arrival. Check-in is from mid-afternoon and check-out is mid-morning, so a ryokan "night" is shorter than a hotel's. Arrive early enough to bathe before dinner. At the entrance you step out of your shoes onto the raised floor and into house slippers; a member of staff shows you to the room, pours tea and asks what time you want dinner. Choose the earlier option if you are tired: the kitchen runs to a schedule, and late arrivals can lose their meal.

The room. A tatami room with a low table and floor chairs, a small alcove with a flower or a scroll, and sliding paper screens. The futon are not out yet. Slippers come off at the edge of the tatami; walk on the mats in socks or bare feet. Yukata, a sash and a short jacket are folded on the table. Put the yukata on with the left side over the right (the opposite is used only for dressing the dead), tie the sash at the waist and wear it to the bath, to dinner and, in a hot-spring town, out into the street.

The bath. Go before dinner. The large baths are usually divided by sex, with the signs sometimes swapped in the morning so that both sides get to see each bath. The rules are in the next section.

Dinner. Kaiseki, served in your room or in a dining room at the time you chose: a procession of small courses built around the season and the region, often with the inn's signature dish, which may be a hotpot cooked at the table. While you eat, staff come into your room to lay out the futon.

Night and morning. The bath is usually open late and again early; a dawn soak is one of the pleasures of the stay. Breakfast is at a fixed time, usually Japanese (rice, miso soup, grilled fish, pickles, a small egg dish), and check-out follows soon after. Settle the bill, including any bathing and accommodation tax, at the front desk.

Ryokan etiquette: shoes, yukata, the bath, tattoos and tipping

JNTO's ryokan guide is reassuring on this point: "A ryokan stay, with its emphasis on Japanese customs and procedures, may seem intimidating for the non-initiated. However, the staff is welcoming and ready to allay concerns." Nobody expects you to know everything. A handful of rules cover almost all of it.

Shoes. Off at the entrance, into slippers; slippers off again before you step onto tatami. Separate toilet slippers live inside the toilet door. Leave them there.

Yukata. Wear it. It is a garment, not a dressing gown, and the whole inn wears it to dinner and to the bath. Left side over right.

The bath. JNTO's FAQ sets out the basics for any onsen or public bath: "Wash your body thoroughly before entering the bath. Swimsuits are not worn; bathing is done without clothing. Do not put towels in the bathwater." In practice: undress in the changing room and leave everything in a basket, take only the small towel, sit at a washing station and soap and rinse completely, then get in. The small towel stays on your head or on the side of the bath. Long hair is tied up out of the water. Keep your voice down, do not swim, and do not take photographs. Dry off with the small towel before you walk back into the changing room, so that the floor stays dry.

Tattoos. JNTO is candid: "Tattoos generally do not cause problems in everyday life in Japan. However, some onsen (hot springs), public baths, and pools may restrict entry for guests with tattoos." Policies vary from inn to inn and are changing, so ask before you book rather than at the changing-room door. If the communal bath is off limits, the usual solutions are a room with its own bath, a private "kashikiri" bath that any guest can reserve by the hour, or, for a small tattoo, a cover-up sticker, which some inns sell or accept.

Meals. Dinner starts when you said it would. Tell the inn about allergies, vegetarian or religious requirements when you book, not on arrival: a kaiseki menu is set days ahead and uses fish stock almost everywhere. Our allergy card puts the request into Japanese for you. What a kaiseki dinner involves, and how to eat it, is in our guide to what to eat in Japan.

Tipping. "No. Japan does not have a tipping culture. In restaurants, hotels, taxis, and other services, you only need to pay the amount shown on the bill," says JNTO. Its Australian office adds that "tipping is not customary and you might even have your tip politely refused", with the sole exceptions of "tour guides, interpreters and some innkeepers". At a ryokan, a thank-you gift to the attendant, handed over in an envelope at the start of the stay, is a Japanese custom called kokorozuke; it is optional, unusual among foreign guests and never expected.

Noise and children. Walls are paper. Keep voices and televisions low after dinner. Many inns welcome children, but ask whether a children's meal is offered and whether the bath has family hours, so that a small child can go in with a parent of the other sex. Our guide to Japan with kids covers the rest of a family trip.

Where to stay in a ryokan: Hakone, Kyoto, Hokkaido and the onsen towns

The best first ryokan is in a hot-spring town, where the whole place runs on the same evening rhythm and you can stroll between baths in your yukata. These are the areas visitors search for most, with what each is good for:

• Hakone (Kanagawa). The closest well-known hot-spring area to Tokyo, reached in an afternoon from Shinjuku, with a great many inns from grand old houses to modern ones with private open-air baths. The default choice for a one-night ryokan stop between Tokyo and Kyoto.
• Kyoto. City ryokan rather than onsen ryokan: wooden townhouses near Gion and the river, large inns near the station, quieter ones in Arashiyama. The food and the house are the point, not the spring. Kyoto city charges an accommodation tax on top of the room rate.
• Hokkaido. Noboribetsu, Jozankei outside Sapporo, Lake Toya and the ski resorts around Niseko have hot-spring inns with the best winter scenery in Japan. Hokkaido introduced a prefectural accommodation tax in April 2026, and some towns add their own.
• Kinosaki (Hyogo), Kusatsu (Gunma), Gero and Takayama (Gifu), Beppu and Yufuin (Oita), Kurokawa (Kumamoto), Ginzan Onsen (Yamagata), Dogo (Ehime), Atami (Shizuoka) and Nasu (Tochigi) are classic hot-spring towns, each with dozens of ryokan. Kinosaki, where guests walk between seven public baths in yukata, is the one most often recommended to first-timers who want the whole town, not just the inn.

One town is enough. Two ryokan nights in different places means two early check-outs and two sets of trains; most first-timers do better with one or two nights in one inn and hotels for the rest. Our prefecture pages cover the hot-spring areas in each part of the country.

How to book a ryokan

Most ryokan are on the big booking sites, and JNTO's list of online reservation services names the Japanese ones worth knowing: Rakuten Travel, which it calls "the biggest online hotel reservation company in Japan"; Jalan.net, "one of the biggest online hotel and ryokan reservation services in Japan"; JAPANiCAN, with "over 4,000 hotels and ryokan"; the Japan Ryokan & Hotel Association, a non-profit of "approximately 3,000 members"; and SELECTED ONSEN RYOKAN, a multilingual portal for more than 200 hot-spring inns. The international sites list many of the same inns, usually at the same price.

Whichever you use, check six things before you pay:

1. Per person or per room. Japanese sites quote per person; some international sites convert to a room total. Make sure the number of guests, including children and their ages, is exact.
2. Meals. "Two meals", "breakfast only" or "room only" changes both the price and the experience. First time, take two meals.
3. Bath and toilet. Older inns have shared toilets and no bath in the room. The listing will say "private bath" or "open-air bath in room" if there is one.
4. Check-in window. Inns set a last check-in time because dinner is scheduled. Tell them your train if you will be late.
5. Tattoo policy and bath hours, if either matters to you.
6. Cancellation terms, which start earlier than at hotels.

Japanese-style inns with Western beds exist too, and are worth searching for if a night on a futon is the one thing holding you back.

Are ryokans worth it?

For one or two nights, yes, for almost everyone. A ryokan stay is among the things British, American and Canadian visitors most often say they want on their next trip (61.1%, 52.0% and 49.0% in the 2025 survey). The cost is real, but it buys a room, a bath, a dinner you could not easily order elsewhere and a breakfast, in a place designed for exactly that evening.

It is less worth it if you want to come and go on your own schedule (dinner is at a set time), if you need a bed and a chair rather than a floor (choose an inn with a Western-style room), if you are travelling alone (some inns do not take single guests, and those that do may charge a supplement), or if you plan a long stay: the routine is designed for a night or two, not a week. The sensible plan is a hotel in the cities, as 85% of visitors choose, and one deliberate ryokan night in a hot-spring town.

To cite or link to this page: Staying at a ryokan in Japan: what it costs, what a night is like, how the bath works and where first-timers should book one — Japan Pocket Guide, https://japanpocketguide.com/plan/ryokan/ Copy