We made arrangements to stay at this hotel from the train station - and were pleasantly surprised. It was a good value - with nice, large (by Japanese standards) rooms. Free computers in the lobby. Free bicycles - which was great for going to the castle. We loved Matsumoto and this hotel so much that we considered returning.

This was my second time in two months. They upgraded my room for free. I stayed a bigger room than the last time I stayed. I think this hotel is the biggest and best class in this town; they even have bell men (and women.) When I stayed here last time in April, I stayed at small single room and that was very small. The location is a little hard to find from the station for the first time but if you use freeway bus from Tokyo, it's nearby the bus terminal. This hotel offers free bus shuttle service to natural spring hot bath at their sister Japanese style hotel once a day in the evening, so I recommend to try. (be sure to ask the time when you check in. )

Service is pretty good as with most Japanese hotels. The room is spacious, comfortable and quite clean.

The buffet dinner was quite good but quite a number of dishes were not replenished by 8 plus. Quite disappointed with that.

Location's pretty good as it's next to a train station.

We visited Matsumoto in October 2008 - our second trip to Japan. Based on the research I did before making our reservation at Buena Vista, this is probably one of the nicer hotels in the city.

The guidebook we had read said that Matsumoto was a good home base to explore other towns and national parks in the area. If I could do it over again, I would have chosen to stay in a smaller, more charming town perhaps at a Minshuku (b&b) or Ryokan. The hotel, like the city was somewhat underwhelming to us. It just wasn’t a romantic, stylish place you would want to spend a lot of time in, but fine for sleeping at night.

Hotel:
The lobby is modern and nicely updated, but unfortunately at the time of our stay these improvements had not been made to our rooms. Check in was easy and pleasant. Since this is a nicer business hotel I had hoped they would have had a fitness center. I think they have a partnership with a local gym nearby, but when you want a quick workout before starting your day it is not that convenient.

Room
The rooms were dated – probably from the late 1980’s. Blue carpet, wallpaper, old style tube TV’s – you get the point. The carpet in the hallways were pretty worn. This is one of the nicer hotels in the city, so hopefully they have plans to update the rooms to match their lobby.

Food
We did not try any of the food at the hotel. I think they had 2-3 restaurants. The city is known for their soba noodles (and horse meat which we were not adventuress enough to try). There were many restaurants in walking distance of the hotels and most that we tried were quite good.

Miscellaneous
I have to say that even though Matsumoto was not our number one place we visited on our trip, we did have one of our favorite days in Japan while staying there. We took the train to the nearby small town of Hotaka where we rented bicycles and rode to a Soba noodle school (taught in Japanese only). After making and eating our own soba we rode our bikes to the Daio Wasabi Farm where we toured the farm and got to taste wasabi ice cream!