Jozankei Daiichi Hotel Suizantei

Every room has a bath of 100% spring water, the lounge pours free beer, sake and cheesecake from afternoon to midnight, and a free shuttle runs from central Sapporo — Hokkaido's easiest onsen escape, if you don't mind stairs and busy dinners

Suizantei opened in 1957 as the Jozankei Daiichi Hotel and took its current name in 2002 from a seal-script inscription a calligrapher left during a stay. It has about 51–57 rooms (sources differ), all with their own bath of the inn's sodium chloride spring — three sources rising from the Toyohira riverbed at around 69°C — from 45㎡ hinoki-bath twins to 160㎡ special rooms with a shallow lie-down bath and a beer server; it's for guests of primary-school age and up. The draw that every review mentions is the second-floor lounge: free coffee and sweets in the afternoon, the house cheesecake at 16:30, beer, highballs and sake from 19:00 to 23:00, and a bookshop of some 2,500 titles. Stays include the group's '36-hour stay' — a bath-and-sauna facility from 11:00 on arrival and another hot spring until 23:00 after check-out. Japanese guests rate it 4.5 across 3,325 reviews on one major site and 4.47 across 1,451 on another. Dinners range from a ¥6,000 casual course to a ¥30,000 premium one with charcoal grilling and over 100 sakes. The caveats: the in-room 'free-flowing' baths are often a fill-and-temper system in practice, the large baths' treatment isn't stated and one guest found them all lukewarm, the building is on a slope with many stairs, and 2026 reviewers mention rushed or slow dinners, small portions, a crowded lounge and new staff still finding their feet. Most 2026 reviewers paid over ¥30,000 per person.