GENSEN HOLDINGS Co., Ltd. (the Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Group) has announced that it will reopen “Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Kinoyu (大江戸温泉物語 輝乃湯)”, which it operates in Yubara Onsen, Maniwa City, Okayama Prefecture, as the dog-exclusive “Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Wanwan Resort Okayama Yubara (大江戸温泉物語わんわんリゾート 岡山湯原)” on Saturday, December 5, 2026, and has been taking reservations since October 1. It is the sixth Wanwan Resort and the brand’s first property in Okayama. Published rates start at ¥13,900 per adult per night with dinner and breakfast (based on two adults sharing a room), plus ¥3,200 per dog per night (excluding bathing tax and accommodation tax). This article quantifies the Maniwa lodging market that will host the property from three angles — estimated settled ADR, estimated occupancy and booking pace — to assess how deep the pool of pet-friendly lodging in the Chugoku region actually is, and where the published rate sits within the local price range.

Opening Overview — Okayama’s First Dog-Exclusive Inn, Created by Converting an Existing Property

First, the facts that can be confirmed from published materials. The opening date is Saturday, December 5, 2026, and reservations opened on Thursday, October 1, 2026. The property is located at 1429-2 Toyosaka, Maniwa City, Okayama, in the Yubara Onsen hot-spring town about five minutes by car from the Yubara IC on the Yonago Expressway. Its predecessor is “Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Kinoyu”, which the group has operated; the fact that this is a format conversion through renovation of an existing property, not a new build, makes it a particularly useful reference for ryokan operators in hot-spring areas. Since integrating Yukai Resort, the group has been reorganizing its brands and lifting room rates.

Published rates start at ¥13,900 per adult per night with two meals (two adults sharing a room), and ¥3,200 per dog per night (excluding bathing tax and accommodation tax; varies by date). Both dinner and breakfast will be buffets featuring Okayama ingredients. The room count could not be confirmed in the press release or on the official website, so we show 57 rooms as a reference value based on listing data tracked by MetroEngines Research (Kinoyu was listed with 62 rooms, and the room configuration may change with the renovation).

Source: Compiled by HotelBank Editorial Team from the GENSEN HOLDINGS press release (October 2026) and MetroEngines Research

A note on units. The published ¥13,900 is a two-meal rate “per adult”, while the estimated settled ADR used in this article is a tax-excluded equivalent rate “per room”. Converted to two guests per room, the published floor becomes ¥27,800 per room (excluding tax), and this per-room figure is used in the comparisons that follow.

Estimated Settled ADR in Maniwa — Winter (December–January) Sits at the Top of the Year

Tracking Maniwa’s (N=19–22 properties) estimated settled ADR by month with MetroEngines Research data, the highest finalized value in the last 12 months (October 2025–September 2026) was ¥14,800 in January 2026, followed by ¥14,500 in August 2026, ¥13,400 in December 2025 and ¥13,300 in November 2025. By contrast, June 2026 came in at only ¥10,100 and April 2026 at ¥10,500, a spread of about ¥4,700 across the year. Maniwa, centered on Yubara Onsen, reads as a “winter-type” market where rates rise during the December–January snow-viewing and year-end/New Year season, alongside the summer holidays.

Year over year, January 2026 rose +21.6% from ¥12,200 to ¥14,800, August 2026 +5.2% from ¥13,800 to ¥14,500, and September +9.9% from ¥10,500 to ¥11,500 — the busier the month, the larger the gain. However, April–June 2026 came in 4–7% below the prior year, so the gap between peak and off-peak seasons is widening. The December 5 opening date falls right in the upper part of this rate curve.

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (Maniwa, all property types, estimated settled ADR, finalized months only, N=19–22 properties)

Narrowing down by property type makes the difference even clearer. The estimated settled ADR of Maniwa’s ryokan category (N=12–13 properties) was ¥16,700 in December 2025, ¥17,000 in January 2026 and ¥17,900 in August 2026, roughly ¥3,000 above the all-type median. Given that the same months for Okayama Prefecture as a whole (N=186–193 properties) fall in the ¥8,000–9,700 band, Maniwa is a hot-spring area settling at 1.5–1.8x the prefectural average, placing it among the higher-priced markets in the prefecture (for the price tiers of Okayama’s municipalities, see Why Okayama Hotels Feel Expensive: 4 Price Tiers by Municipality).

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (estimated settled ADR, tax-excluded equivalent, two per room, finalized months only; N is the number of properties covered in each month)

Estimated Occupancy in Maniwa — 84.6% in August, About 90% on Saturdays

Beyond rates, we also want to check how full rooms get. Maniwa’s estimated occupancy based on OTA-listed inventory (a fixed cohort of properties that list at least 30% of their total rooms on major booking sites) was 71.9% in June 2026 (10 properties / 297 rooms), 74.0% in July (11 properties / 432 rooms), 84.6% in August (13 properties / 378 rooms) and 77.0% in September (12 properties / 332 rooms). By day of week, August averaged 90.9% on Saturdays versus 84.1% Monday–Thursday, and September 90.0% on Saturdays versus 76.5% Monday–Thursday; Saturdays sell through to around 90% in every month.

These figures are estimates based on how OTA-listed inventory sells through and differ from each property’s actual occupancy. Because unlisted rooms are counted on the sold side, they tend to run higher than reality; even so, the pattern of Yubara Onsen’s Saturday inventory being almost gone close to the stay date is consistently observed across months.

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (Maniwa, all property types, estimated occupancy based on OTA-listed inventory, finalized months; property and room counts are each month’s fixed cohort)

What about booking pace toward the opening day, Saturday, December 5? This article uses only observations within a lead time (LT, days before the stay date) of 45 days; as of writing (October 22), December 5 had only just entered LT44, and no observations within 45 days were yet available. Instead, we line up the booking curves for the three most recent Saturdays with completed observations (August 8, September 19 and October 10) alongside the in-progress readings for Saturday, November 21 and Saturday, November 28, to see “when and how fast” Saturdays in Maniwa fill up.

All three completed dates were at 74–81% at LT45, 85–87% at LT30 and 93–99% at LT14, and reached 98% or higher the day before the stay. September 19, the first day of a five-day holiday, hit 95.2% at LT21; August 8, just before Obon (11 properties / 366 rooms), reached 98.4% at LT3; and October 10 (24 properties / 592 rooms) 98.5% at LT1 — on every Saturday, remaining rooms nearly disappear in the last two weeks. The in-progress November 21 (24 properties / 583 rooms) has sold through from 87.0% at LT45 to 96.6% at LT32, while November 28 (23 properties / 582 rooms) stood at 73.7% at LT39, tracking slightly below the three completed dates at the same point (77.6–82.1%). Whether the opening Saturday also rides this “80s at LT30, 90s at LT14” curve will become visible in observations from mid-November onward.

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (Maniwa, all property types, LT45→1 only. 8/8: 11 properties / 366 rooms; 9/19: 24 properties / 621 rooms; 10/10: 24 properties / 592 rooms; 11/21: 24 properties / 583 rooms; 11/28: 23 properties / 582 rooms)

Capacity for Pet-Friendly Demand — 19 Properties in Okayama Have Dog Facilities Discussed in Reviews, vs. 100+ in Shizuoka

Next, we use guest reviews to measure how scarce the dog-exclusive inn format is in this area. HotelBank Editorial Team ran NLP analysis on reviews from the last 24 months and counted, by prefecture, properties with at least 10 mentions of “pets allowed / dog run / pet facilities”. Shizuoka has 100 or more (the counting cap), Nagano 82, Chiba 77, Tochigi 71 and Hyogo 54, showing a thick layer in tourist areas of the Tokyo metro region and Chubu. By contrast, the Chugoku region has just 19 in Okayama, 17 in Hiroshima, 14 in Tottori, 8 in Yamaguchi and 5 in Shimane — 63 across all five prefectures, fewer than Nagano alone.

This distribution means dog owners in Chugoku and western Kansai looking for dog-friendly lodging have limited choices, and from a new entrant’s perspective it signals scarcity of supply. Indeed, the top 15 properties nationwide by mention count are dominated by specialist inns in eastern Japan and Chubu — four in Shizuoka and two each in Chiba, Mie and Tochigi — with only one from the Chugoku region, an inn in Kaike Onsen, Tottori (329 mentions, 79.9% mention rate). More dog-focused inns at hot-spring resorts in western Japan should in itself broaden the regional demand base. The full national ranking and regional distribution are covered in Pet-Friendly Hotels in Japan: 81-Property Review Ranking.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis. Number of properties with at least 10 mentions of dog-friendly facilities in guest reviews over the last 24 months. Shizuoka is capped at 100.)

Among Okayama properties where dog-friendly facilities are prominently mentioned are Setouchi resort/villa-type properties (mention rates of 40.0% and 62.5%), hot-spring inns in the prefecture’s north such as Tsuyama, Yunogo and Okutsu, and one long-established ryokan in Yubara Onsen (19 mentions). In other words, Yubara Onsen already has a base of welcoming guests with dogs, and 57 rooms renovated to be entirely dog-exclusive will now be added to it. According to the Japan Pet Food Association’s National Dog and Cat Ownership Survey (2022), there are 7.05 million pet dogs in Japan, with 426,000 newly acquired in a year — owners’ travel demand is a scale that hot-spring areas cannot ignore.

Source: HotelBank Editorial Team research (NLP analysis of guest reviews over the last 24 months. Mention rate = share of reviews that refer to dog-friendly facilities; not a rating score)

Where Does “From ¥13,900” Sit in Maniwa’s Price Range? — About 1.9–2.1x the City Median per Room

To sum up so far, Maniwa’s estimated settled ADR (per room, tax-excluded equivalent) is ¥13,400 in December and ¥14,800 in January; for the ryokan category it is ¥16,700 in December and ¥17,000 in January. Converting the published floor of ¥13,900 to ¥27,800 per room for two (excluding tax) and lining them up, it sits at about 2.1x the citywide median in December and about 1.9x in January, and about 1.6–1.7x even against the ryokan category. Estimated settled ADR is the median of settled-rate estimates that apply a property-type correction to each property’s lowest rate level, while the published floor is the starting point of a rate card, so the two are not strictly on the same scale; still, it is clear that the floor — which includes the added value of being dog-exclusive — is well above the settled level of a typical inn in the city.

It is also informative that the predecessor Kinoyu’s estimated settled ADR was ¥13,000 in December 2025, ¥17,800 in January 2026 and ¥16,400 in August 2026, generally above the citywide median. The published floor after the conversion is set roughly ¥10,000 higher still, which reads as a design to lift the price band by a notch in the same building with the same hot spring by narrowing the customer base to a clear use case: traveling with dogs.

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (all figures per room for two, excluding tax / tax-excluded equivalent. ADR is estimated settled ADR for finalized months; the published floor is from the GENSEN HOLDINGS press release)

Looking at listed prices on OTAs (two per room, tax-included, all plans), for December 2026 (the 5th–31st, when listings exist) the new property’s daily average of the lowest plan is about ¥24,400 and the average across all plans about ¥57,600; the lowest-plan average is close to the published floor of ¥27,800 per room (excluding tax). By date, the lowest plan is ¥39,600 on Saturday, December 5, ¥39,400 on Saturday, December 12 and ¥42,800 on Saturday, December 19 — around ¥40,000 on Saturdays — versus ¥13,800–17,000 on weekdays from December 6 to 25 (plan conditions vary by date), and ¥63,200 at year-end on December 30 and 31, showing clear price differences between weekends, weekdays and year-end. These are listed levels at the time of the survey and will change as stay dates approach.

Yubara Onsen’s Room Stock — 9 Operating Properties, 271 Rooms Within 3 km, 90% Ryokan

Now to the supply surrounding the new property in Yubara Onsen. The room stock in this article covers lodging properties with 10 or more rooms (excluding leisure hotels) within a 3,000 m radius of Yubara Onsen; “operating” means properties with sales prices confirmed on major booking sites in the last three months (August–October 2026) (as of October 22, 2026, compiled by MetroEngines Research). There are 9 operating properties with 271 rooms, of which 8 ryokan with 261 rooms and 1 resort hotel with 10 rooms. By size, properties with 50 rooms or fewer account for 8 properties and 209 rooms; the only property in the 51–100 room band is Kinoyu (62 rooms), meaning the new property will devote Yubara Onsen’s largest room inventory to dog-exclusive use.

By opening era, of the 9 operating properties, 5 opened in the 1960s–70s (143 rooms), 2 in the 2000s (91 rooms), 1 in the 2010s (27 rooms) and 1 in the 1980s (10 rooms) — a hot-spring town centered on long-established ryokan. According to the local Yubara-cho Ryokan Cooperative, Yubara Onsen’s overnight guests fell from about 120,000 in FY2019 to about 70,000 in FY2021, then recovered to about 80% of the 2019 level by spring 2022. At a stage of regaining pre-pandemic levels, the addition of a specialist inn that draws a new customer segment should be a tailwind for the whole hot-spring town.

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (as of October 2026). Circle size indicates room count; dark blue marks the new property.

Source: Compiled by MetroEngines Research and HotelBank Editorial Team (as of October 2026. Kinoyu switches to the new name from December 5.)

Implications for Hot-Spring Operators and Investors — Lifting the Price Band a Notch by Repurposing an Existing Property

This is a case of reworking an existing hot-spring ryokan for a specific demand segment without new-build investment, and setting the published floor at around twice the city’s typical settled level. In a market like Maniwa, where rates rise in winter and Saturdays are over 90% full by LT14, the upside for revenue lies in how to move weekday and Sunday inventory. Because the dog-travel theme includes owners who can travel easily on weekdays (seniors and remote workers), it is also effective for cultivating weekday demand.

From an investor’s perspective, the thin layer of dog-exclusive inns in western Japan points to room for entry. While more than 100 properties in Shizuoka have dog-friendly facilities discussed in reviews, only 63 do across the five Chugoku prefectures — a distribution that partly reflects supply not keeping up rather than an absence of demand. A renovation-based business that adds dedicated facilities such as dog runs, lounges and dog meals to existing assets — hot springs, rooms and food — merits consideration for both speed of launch and restrained investment. After opening, tracking where the new property’s inventory sell-through runs against Maniwa’s Saturday curve shown here (“80s at LT30, 90s at LT14”) should allow an early judgment on whether its pricing is appropriate.

Summary

Wanwan Resort Okayama Yubara is the Ooedo Onsen Monogatari Group’s sixth dog-exclusive inn and its first in Okayama, opening on December 5, 2026 through the renovation of Kinoyu. The host market, Maniwa, posted estimated settled ADR of ¥14,800 in January 2026 (+21.6% YoY) and ¥14,500 in August (+5.2%), with rates rising in winter and summer; estimated occupancy was 84.6% in August (13 properties / 378 rooms), and Saturdays sell through to over 90% by LT14. Properties with dog-friendly facilities discussed in reviews number 19 in Okayama and 63 across the five Chugoku prefectures — thin compared with eastern Japan — making this capacity scarce. Converting the published floor of ¥13,900 (per adult, two meals) to ¥27,800 per room (excluding tax) places it at about 1.9–2.1x the city median and about 1.6–1.7x the ryokan category, confirming a design that lifts the price band a notch by repurposing an existing property. Once booking pace for December 5 enters the LT45 window, we will revisit it against Maniwa’s Saturday curve.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. When does Wanwan Resort Okayama Yubara open, and when did reservations start?
It opens on Saturday, December 5, 2026, and has been accepting reservations since Thursday, October 1, 2026.

Q. How much does it cost?
From ¥13,900 per adult per night with two meals (two adults sharing a room), plus ¥3,200 per dog per night (excluding bathing tax and accommodation tax). For two guests per room, the floor is ¥27,800 per room (excluding tax).

Q. When are lodging rates in Maniwa highest?
By estimated settled ADR, January 2026 (¥14,800) and August (¥14,500) are the highest, followed by December and November — a winter-type market.