Changes to Services Due to COVID-19

Hello, All,

Well, it’s been an odd seven months, hasn’t it? Frightening, sad, stressful, confusing, frustrating…

In Kamakura—and Japan in general—we’ve fared fairly well so far, but have been anguished to watch other countries deal with large outbreaks. Over the years, we’ve been lucky to have guests from all over the world stay with us, and seeing cities we’ve learned of from guests go into lockdown has left us heavy-hearted. From the bottom of our hearts, we hope that you and yours are well, and that you stay that way.

At Inn By The Sea Kamakura, we’ve been trying to find ways to make things a little safer for guests and for us, and we’ve come to the sad conclusion that temporarily suspending our breakfast service is probably one of the best decisions we can make. As such, please note that all reservations made after July 13th do not include meals. This is reflected in our new rate plans on Booking.com, which you might notice are considerably cheaper than they used to be.

Breakfast has always been our favourite part of the job. It’s when we get a chance to chat with our guests, answer their questions, and get to know each other. The connections we’re able to make are very likely the main reason we have such a high rating on Booking.com. We’re sad to be giving up this part of the business, but we believe that closing our dining room, breakfast service and self-serve tea and coffee service is the best way to protect our guests. The dining room is simply not large enough to provide proper spacing and we are not well enough equipped to provide room service.

Though we have shared washrooms and bathrooms, we will be doing our best to assign one bathroom and one washroom to each room so that sharing is not required (though please note that washrooms/bathrooms are not located in rooms). We will also take care to disinfect doorknobs and sink faucets more often than usual.

We will also be requesting that our guests wear masks when outside of their rooms.

We hope that we’ll be back to chatting with guests over breakfast soon. Until then, we ask for your understanding.

Warmest regards,

Helen, Hisashi, Kaede and Nanami