Kinosaki Onsen Kiraku

A small, barefoot-friendly wooden inn in the middle of Kinosaki with two private baths that are free on most plans, Tajima beef or crab dinners in private dining rooms and some of the town's highest guest scores — but the house is old, sound carries, there's no lift and no room has its own bath

Kiraku is an 11-room wooden inn on Kinosaki's main street, two minutes' walk from the Goshonoyu and Mandarayu public baths, and it treats the town as its real bathhouse: every guest gets the soto-yu pass. Under a town rule limiting in-house bath size, its own men's and women's baths are small, so the draw is two private baths — Tsuki, a ceramic tub, and Nagare, an iron-cauldron tub for two — free on most two-meal plans booked through the official site or the big booking sites. Rooms are 8–16-mat Japanese rooms or renovated Japanese-Western rooms with twin semi-double beds; you walk the tatami and carpet barefoot because there are no slippers. Most recent evidence comes from booking-site reviews: guests rate it 4.62 across 1,922 reviews on Rakuten Travel, which gave it a Gold Award for 2025, and 4.8 across 1,778 on Jalan (service and cleanliness both 4.8). One 4travel blogger who stayed in June 2023 called the private dining room 'paradise' after a beef dinner of shabu-shabu, steak and meat sushi. Reviewers from 2025–2026 praise the cleanliness of the refurbished rooms, kind staff, generous dinners of Tajima beef, abalone and nodoguro (crab from 7 November) and the convenient location. The complaints are about the building: no lift to second- and third-floor rooms, steep stairs and lots of steps, sliding doors and voices heard late at night (March, September and October 2026), no views, and thin futons. A March 2026 guest found dinner rushed and dishes lukewarm. Two-meal plans run from about ¥12,000 to ¥28,000 per person in autumn and ¥22,000–42,000 for crab in winter.