Terms of Use

Acceptance

By accessing or using RyokanTravel, users accept these Terms of Use. If a user acts on behalf of a ryokan, agency, tourism office, media outlet, or other partner, they confirm that they have the required authority.

RyokanTravel may update these terms to reflect new features, legal obligations, partners, economic models, security requirements, or editorial changes.

Covered Features

• Searching and filtering ryokans by destination, score, facilities, environment, dining, baths, accessibility, indicative prices, and other criteria.
• Viewing detailed ryokan pages, photos, practical information, review summaries, strengths, weaknesses, maps, and nearby points of interest.
• Adding ryokans to an itinerary, organizing route stops, storing local favorites, comparing stays, sharing routes where enabled, and browsing public itineraries.
• Creating or using an account when remote saving, synchronization, sharing, or personalized functions are enabled.
• Using contact, correction, partnership, product suggestion, and personal data request forms.
• Following links to third-party price, availability, booking, payment, insurance, or complementary service platforms.

RyokanTravel's Role

RyokanTravel helps users discover, compare, and organize travel around ryokans. The information published is intended for discovery, planning, and decision support. It is not a guarantee of availability, price, suitability, or contractual performance by a ryokan.

Scores, rankings, labels, badges, review summaries, and recommendations are based on editorial criteria, available data, traveler feedback, and internal analysis. They may be corrected, changed, or removed at any time.

RyokanTravel does not provide legal, medical, immigration, tax, insurance, financial, safety, or emergency advice. Travelers remain responsible for checking visa rules, entry conditions, insurance coverage, health needs, mobility requirements, weather alerts, transport disruptions, and local safety information before and during their trip.

Bookings and Third Parties

When users click through to a partner, they leave RyokanTravel's environment and enter the contractual environment of that third party. Prices, taxes, fees, availability, cancellation rules, refunds, payment methods, and customer service are governed by the partner or property.

Users must read the applicable terms before booking. RyokanTravel is not responsible for unavailability, pricing errors, refusal of booking, schedule changes, payment issues, cancellations, overbooking, stay incidents, or services supplied by third parties.

RyokanTravel may receive compensation from affiliate links, partner links, sponsored placements, leads, advertising, or other commercial arrangements. Such compensation does not make RyokanTravel the seller of the accommodation or third-party service unless expressly stated in a separate written agreement.

RyokanTravel does not ask users to submit payment card details through the legal/contact pages or ordinary planning forms. Any payment flow displayed by a third party is governed by that third party's own terms, privacy policy, security measures, and customer support.

Accounts, Favorites, and Itineraries

Favorites and itineraries may be stored locally in the browser or, depending on enabled features, associated with a user account. Users are responsible for the information they enter, the confidentiality of their access credentials, and the verification of their route before departure.

A RyokanTravel itinerary is an organization tool. It does not guarantee travel times, train connections, weather conditions, closures, accessibility, physical feasibility, or compatibility with real-world schedules. Every route should be checked before booking.

RyokanTravel may remove or restrict an account, public itinerary, comment, suggestion, or contribution in case of abuse, spam, rights infringement, manifestly false information, unlawful content, or risk to service security.

Locally stored favorites or itineraries may be lost if the user clears browser data, changes device, uses private browsing, blocks storage, or uninstalls browser extensions. RyokanTravel is not responsible for loss of unsynchronized local data.

If itinerary sharing is enabled, users must not publish personal addresses, private contact details, reservation references, passport data, payment information, sensitive travel constraints, or information about other travelers without permission.

Scores, Reviews, Votes, and Filters

Scores, review summaries, public votes, filters, tags, and badges are decision-support tools. They may combine automated processing, editorial rules, third-party data, user feedback, cached values, and manual adjustments. They do not represent an objective certification, official classification, or guarantee that a ryokan will match every user's expectations.

Filters may hide relevant properties or include imperfect matches because accommodation data is complex, multilingual, seasonal, and sometimes incomplete. Users should always verify essential requirements such as private bath availability, meal plans, allergies, accessibility, tattoos, children policies, check-in times, and transport access with the property or booking platform.

Contributions and Suggestions

By sending a correction, suggestion, improvement idea, ryokan information, user feedback, or other content, users allow RyokanTravel to analyze, rewrite, integrate, publish, translate, or use it to improve the service, without compensation unless separately agreed in writing.

Users guarantee that their contributions do not violate third-party rights, trade secrets, copyright, image rights, contractual obligations, confidentiality rules, or applicable law.

Ryokan owners, tourism organizations, agencies, and partners who submit information confirm that the information is accurate to the best of their knowledge and that they have the right to share any text, photo, logo, rate information, or operational detail supplied to RyokanTravel.

Partner Images and Rights Warranty

When a hotel owner, property representative, tourism body, agency, API provider, affiliate network, or commercial partner supplies images or other media to RyokanTravel, that supplier grants RyokanTravel a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, reproduce, display, resize, crop, compress, cache, adapt for layout, and use the media on RyokanTravel for search, comparison, editorial, itinerary, map, archive, and property presentation purposes.

The supplier warrants that it has obtained all rights and permissions required from photographers, agencies, employees, guests, models, architects, designers, trademark owners, and any other rights holders whose rights may be involved. The supplier also warrants that the media does not infringe copyright, neighboring rights, trademark rights, image rights, privacy rights, contractual restrictions, or platform/API terms.

The supplier agrees to handle, defend, and indemnify RyokanTravel against claims, costs, damages, losses, settlement amounts, and reasonable legal expenses arising from media or information supplied by that supplier, to the extent permitted by applicable law and any separate agreement between the parties.

RyokanTravel may remove, suspend, replace, or stop using any partner-supplied image or media without notice if a claim is received, if rights are unclear, if the source changes its permissions, or if continued display may create legal, privacy, reputational, or commercial risk.

Prohibited Uses

• Mass scraping, automated extraction, circumvention of technical measures, service overload, or resale of the database.
• Using content to build a competing service without authorization.
• Posting fake reviews, false reports, misleading information, or discriminatory, defamatory, violent, sexual, unlawful, or privacy-infringing content.
• Code injection, unauthorized access attempts, email harvesting, spam, phishing, or abusive form submissions.

Availability and Changes

RyokanTravel may modify, suspend, or remove all or part of the website, including V2 features, for maintenance, security, correction, partner changes, technical constraints, or editorial reasons. Permanent availability is not guaranteed.

The website may rely on WordPress, WooCommerce data structures, maps, fonts, anti-spam tools, analytics, hosting, browser storage, and other third-party technologies. A failure, delay, change, quota, or restriction affecting those services may affect RyokanTravel features without prior notice.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, RyokanTravel is not liable for indirect loss, loss of opportunity, loss of enjoyment, loss of data, loss of profit, additional travel costs, or damage resulting from reliance on incomplete information, third-party services, technical interruption, or user misuse of the website.

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability where exclusion is prohibited by mandatory law, including mandatory consumer rights or liability for intentional misconduct where applicable.

Applicable Law

These terms are interpreted under the law applicable to the publisher's place of establishment, subject to mandatory consumer protection rules. In case of a dispute, users should first seek an amicable solution through the contact page.