We had an absolutely wonderful time in Japan, thank you. Madarao is a truly magical winter wonderland.

The hotel was quite basic. We had a nice room but the heating didn’t work which meant that we were boiling all the time and the only way we could control this was by opening the window. This was fine most of the time but clearly doesn’t work during snow blizzards. Our toilet cistern leaked thus there was water sloshing about on the bathroom floor. There are problems with the ski room – being down steep stairs isn’t great, it wasn’t brilliantly organised and the floor was full of puddles.

This said, most of the staff were lovely and friendly, our room was very quiet with fabulous views, the bar was nice, breakfast was good in a decent sized dining room. All in all, we tend to focus on the positives on our holidays – we knew we hadn’t paid for a high class hotel (which we sometimes do but not when we’re skiing which tends to be a bit of a messy business anyway). Thus the negatives were fairly minor in our view but I appreciate they could be deeply irritating to other people. The biggest issue for us was the heating but overall we couldn’t have had a better holiday. Madarao is a beautiful place with uncrowded slopes and some great powder and we were all very sad when we had to leave.