From October 14-17, 2025, I went on a journey across Tohoku using 快活CLUB. I wrote up some basic usage notes on 快活CLUB, but I wanted to elaborate more on what I found when using it and what made this journey particularly enjoyable. 快活 means “cheerful” in Japanese (roughly), and that's basically my experience with using this service over 4((technically, 3 nights during this but I stayed in one the day before too) nights.

快活CLUB amenities are often more luxurious than a hotel. As silly as this sounds, I found it much more enjoyable to use 快活CLUB for its amenities than anything else. First of all, you have an abundance of manga you that you can read, but the main thing that they offer is a lot of random misc essentials that are free / included. For example, unlimited soft drinks, hot tea, hot coffee (and assorted coffee beverages), and ice cream are genuinely really nice comforts. I didn't expect to like this as much as I did, but it was seriously so refreshing to be able to casually decide to make a hot cocoa and get ice cream at 1am.

快活CLUB has unrivaled flexibility. When traveling via hotel, you simply have to book hotels in-advance or at least run the risk of having no room. While 快活CLUB does run the risk of having no space, you more-or-less can travel a lot more freely and arrive more dynamically. Rooms can get dicey around 10-11pm, but before that it's totally acceptable to get a room basically ad-hoc. The real benefit comes from deciding when to leave, though. On one of my journey days, a massive storm front rolled in and turned the outside world into a guerilla rain storm that lasted the entire day. There was absolutely no pressure for me to check out of my room by a fixed time though. I just stayed at the club and did other things while waiting for the storm to quiet down.

快活CLUB's parsimonious rooms are actually quite freeing. A really unexpected benefit I found was that I could justifiably travel lighter than I ever had, knowing I could always wash my clothes, shower, and get local amenities. In hotel rooms, even if you stay consecutive nights, you generally need to vacate your room for cleaning during the day at least once or twice. 快活CLUB is dynamic and flexible, and you can drop in and out of a new room without worrying about getting “life setup” in the room. It is super simple to pack back up and leave when you only have a few items.

It should be obvious, but the showers, bathrooms, and public areas are, well, public. You will see and run into other people, and usually this is fine. Actually, maybe it was a bit heartening to know other people were around me?

But the main thing that this leads to is that bathrooms and showers are necessarily limited and constrained. For the price, I think the package is worth it, but you're not going to have a perfectly clean bathroom every time for the same reason your home isn't a perfectly clean bathroom: it's used regularly. The showers, in-particular, you will often find still have water inside from the previous guest. Is this okay to me? Yes. Is this okay to you? Maybe not.