日航千姬物语酒店

This Ryokan Style Hotel was an amazing surprise to our journey through Japan! The hotel is very well maintained with super amazing mountain and river views, and their Onsen are top notch with super high quality amenities! The food is really amazing and plentiful, I recommend booking with the Half board option to get both the breakfast and the dinner (kaiseki style). They are served on a private room on either the second or first floor. I do recommend contacting them in advance (or even prior to booking) in case you have a food allergy; they will make their best effort to accommodate if the allergy is 'simple' but won't be able to accommodate if its something more complex like 'gluten allergy', they do specify that in their web page though so do your research prior instead of trying to bash them out with bad reviews. I have a shellfish allergy and they provided other options for me to still have the experience so I am very gretful for that. The service is quite amazing and welcoming, they have english speaking staff which greatly helps to us foreign visitors. They offer a free shuttle from and to the JR and Bus stations, they have their schedule on their official web page but you could contact them in advance to review prior to your travel. Really recommend this hotel and would like to come back on another season to try different food and views!

Nikko was a great respite from the big cities, and Senhime was the perfect spot to refresh -- a beautiful and spacious room that faced the mountain and river, wonderful staff, excellent food, lovely indoor and outdoor bath. You come away feeling pampered. Its location is also excellent -- situated in a historic residential area that's an easy walk to the Nikko historic district, the imperial summer villa, the Kanmangafuchi Trail, and a botanic garden. The only issue we had was communicating with the staff about pick-up from the train station. The hotel may want to make sure their messaging system is compatible with folks who come from overseas. We ended up taking a taxi over.

Excellent kaiseki cuisine, great onsen baths, comfortable tatami room, and a few minutes walk from the world heritage sites of Nikko. What more would one want?