There are no other reviews in English because very few foreigners seem to stay here. The lobby staff does speak enough English, however, and for the most part, it is a pretty nice hotel, though the wired, in-room, complimentary internet service was spotty.

The negative review is due to one thing only: how the staff handled our bed bug complaint. We travel a lot...all over the world, and we've experienced bed bugs in more than one establishment. They are a fact of life...so what distinguishes a good review from a bad one is how the establishment handles the complaint. And at the Hotel Centnovum, we thought the way they handled things was just tacky.

The first morning there, we tried to attribute the bites to mosquitoes...there are tons in Kyoto this time of year. But the second morning, we had more bites AND there were blood spots on the sheets and pillowcase (tell tale bed bug signs). So I tore apart the bed and found a dead or alive (didn’t try to find out) bed bug in the seam of the mattress. I told my husband we weren’t staying in that room.

He went down to the lobby to tell them we wanted to move while I showered and packed up our stuff. When I came down to check on things, my husband told me that we could move, but since there were no more rooms of the class we had booked, we would have to pay more for a more expensive room. Excuse me? We were getting bitten in our room, but because only more expensive rooms were available, our choice was to stay and keep getting bitten and increase the chance of bringing the bugs home with us, or pay more to move. TACKY.

We could have moved to another hotel, true, but the people we were visiting had made the hotel arrangements and it would have been awkward to have to explain to them why we were moving. So…we decided to suck it up. The hotel ended up cutting us a deal, and didn’t make us pay the full rate increase. Still….we had to pay more for the privilege of moving to a room without bed bugs….which…we never would have tolerated in a place where we had a better grasp of the language and culture.

I was left with a quite negative opinion of the place.