Is Kyoto crowded in November? Three years of official hotel data

By Japan Off-Peak (TechAthletes) · 2026-10-08 · Data: Japan Tourism Agency, counted by us (method)

"Is Kyoto crowded in November?" was the first suggestion Google's autocomplete gave us for "is kyoto crowded in" when we checked on 8 October 2026. Crowds at a temple can't be counted from official statistics, but hotel stays can. So we counted guest nights in Kyoto Prefecture's hotels and inns, month by month, for the last three years.

Short answer: Kyoto's hotels are busier than average in November, but in 2025 it was no longer their busiest month. Guest nights per day were higher in April, May and October. What hasn't changed is that November is the month Japanese travellers fill Kyoto's hotels most.

November, three years in a row

We took the Japan Tourism Agency's confirmed statistics for all types of lodging (hotels, ryokan, guesthouses) and divided each month's guest nights by the number of days in that month, so that a 30-day November and a 31-day October compare fairly. A guest night is one person staying one night, so a visitor who stays three nights counts three times. "Per day" figures below are guest nights per day, not people.

In 2023, November was the busiest month on every count: all guests, foreign guests and Japanese guests. In 2025 it ranked fourth for all guests, at 108.0% of the yearly average per day, and fourth for foreign guests. For Japanese guests it was still first, at 110.4% of their yearly average.

The table also shows something we didn't expect: Japanese guest nights in Kyoto in November fell from 63,735 a day in 2023 to 44,948 in 2025, while foreign guest nights rose. The statistics don't say why, so we won't guess. The result is that in November 2025 foreign visitors were 54.1% of Kyoto's hotel guests, up from 43.0% two years earlier.

The whole of 2025, month by month

Two things stand out:

• April was busier than November. April had about 7% more guests per day than November in 2025.
• Hotels were still busy in November. Room occupancy across all types of lodging combined was 74.3% in November 2025, the second-highest month after October (76.8%). City hotels were 85.6% full.

So "fewer guests than April" does not mean "empty". It means November is one of four busy months, not the single peak.

Who the foreign visitors were

The agency publishes nationality only for hotels with 10 or more staff, so these shares cover a slightly smaller set of hotels than the tables above. In November the largest groups in Kyoto were:

"Other countries (combined)" groups every country outside the 20 the agency lists separately. Visitors from the United States outnumbered those from mainland China in both Novembers. In mid-November 2025 China's foreign ministry, followed by its culture and tourism ministry, advised Chinese citizens to avoid travelling to Japan (Xinhua via SCIO); in Kyoto's November figures, China's share was 15.4% in 2024 and 14.6% in 2025, a small change for the month as a whole. The effect may show more clearly in December and later months, which we haven't analysed here.

Weather and leaves

From the Japan Meteorological Agency's 1991–2020 normals for its Kyoto station:

• Average daily high 17.3°C, average daily low 8.4°C (mean 12.5°C).
• 73.9 mm of rain in the month, about half of October's 143.2 mm.

The agency also records the date when one designated maple tree at its Kyoto observatory has turned red over most of its leaves, with almost no green left. Its normal date is 5 December; it was 10 December in 2025 and 20 December in 2024. That is a single tree in the city, not the famous temple gardens, which change at different times. Still, it suggests that in some years autumn colour in Kyoto may overlap with early December.

What this means if you're planning

• If you want the leaves: expect November hotels to be busy. It wasn't Kyoto's single busiest month in 2025, but rooms were about three-quarters occupied.
• If you want fewer people: the quietest months in Kyoto in 2025 were January and February, with 27% and 23% fewer guests per day than November. Our Kyoto page has every month.
• If you can only go in autumn: the maple record above suggests colour can last into early December. December as a whole had 9% fewer guests per day than November in 2025 and is colder (normal daily high 11.6°C, low 3.5°C, 57.3 mm of rain). The statistics are monthly, so we can't say how much quieter its first week is.

Limits of this data

• These are counts for the whole of Kyoto Prefecture, which includes places like Amanohashidate and Uji as well as Kyoto city. A single famous temple can be crowded in any month.
• Hotel nights don't count day-trippers, or people who visit Kyoto but sleep in another prefecture.
• None of the Kyoto figures used here carry the agency's warning that the standard error is 30% or more.

Sources

• Japan Tourism Agency, Overnight Travel Statistics Survey, confirmed results for 2023, 2024 and 2025: table 2 (guest nights, all facilities), table 8 (room occupancy) and reference table 1 (nationality, hotels with 10+ staff). Downloaded from mlit.go.jp/kankocho. We edited and calculated the figures ourselves.
• Japan Meteorological Agency, climate normals for Kyoto (1991–2020) and maple colouring dates, retrieved 8 October 2026; the definition of the colouring date is from the agency's phenological observation guidelines.
• The calculation script is analysis/a23_kyoto_november.py in our repository; our method page explains the per-day counts.