Japan is a wonderful country, it has an extremely refined culture and civilisation. Its hospitality is well appreciated and renowned around the world, but there is one thing they do get wrong: why make the guests staying at their hotels pay an extra charge to use the hotel's swimming pool?

We had this bad and inconvenient experience during our stay at the Prince Shinagawa Tokyo hotel and the Sheraton Grand Hiroshima hotel on May 5th 2019, where we had to pay 1680 Yen (13,60 Euros) per person every time we wanted to use the swimming pool. We find this pratice scandalous and not very business smart from the hotel chains since we are clients and gold members of their hotel chains. 

We inquired about this practice with the manager of the conciergerie at the Sheraton Grand Hiroshima to try to unsderstand the policy but he could not give any acceptable answer and seemed embarrassed by the situation.

At the end, we still do not know whether this is a policy dictated by the Japanese government or the hotel management itself.

We really wish that this "out to date" practice and bad policy will end one day, so that our future stay in Japan's hotels can be more pleasant and enjoyable.