Shuttle bus from JR Station was hard to find and it runs every 30 min. Travel time by local bus takes 40min and by taxi 20min.
This hotel is clean, safe and average. Reception was polite. Rooms were clean and basic. If you take room with two double beds, you have good wide beds with good bed linens and comfort, but you have limited room to walk and to change your clothes. Bathrooms was very clean with Japanese style automatic toilet. Buffetbreakfast could have been better. It was diveded to US style and Japanese style breakfast with some options. You can have both.
Overall this is average hotel and good bargain if you get offer as we did. It is far away from center but closer to geisha-area and to temples. Two local bus stops in 100m distance. Lot of small dining restaurangs in favour of local people nearby.

Since we were booking during cherry blossom season, it was tough to find vacancies. We stayed the first several nights in Hotel Nishiyama and moved here for the final night. We knew it was out of the way, but it was the only thing we could find in our moderate price range.

There are several washers and dryers, but I was never able to use them since they were in use every time I checked.

The hotel site claims they have a steam room, but they don’t.

No restaurants in the area open late, so plan accordingly if you like late night snacks.

Leave very early to catch the shuttle. We arrived at the shuttle stop 15 minutes before scheduled departure but it was already full. Another one wouldn’t run for several hours, but the hotel desk did call a cab for us. If you factor in the cost of the cab, we could have stayed somewhere more convenient for the same price.

Overall, acceptable, but ordinary. Like an average US hotel, but the most drab of our two week trip – then, again, it was also the cheapest, so it figures.

We booked the Holiday Inn because we didn't understand the Japanese system of shipping bags between hotels ....

We had thought that this was something that only happened easily between hotels of the same chain, and since we were tied in to a chain hotel in Yokohama, booked the same in Kyoto a week later, and at Narita two weeks later. We now realise we could have picked _any_ Kyoto hotel, and _any_ hotel at Narita, and move our clean and dirty clothes between them ...

Anyway, we didn't know about the shuttle bus from JR Kyoto station, which meant that we had a long wait (after we found out), had to pay for a taxi to get us to our first site of the day in the morning, and spent an hour getting back from the last site ... In retrospect, we would have been much better off in the city centre.

The price can't be beat. The rooms are clean. The breakfast buffet has something for conventional American kids' tastes. There's an Internet room with high-speed connections plus two computers provided by the hotel. We're writing this review because we read a strongly negative one on this site and, after staying at the hotel for five nights, thought the negative was totally undeserved. The shuttle to Kyoto station takes only 20 minutes. There's a shopping mall adjacent with stores and supermarket. We would stay there again.