Hoshino Resorts has set a September 2027 opening for its 100-room Fukui hotel, part of a public-private plan to turn museum visits into longer stays.
Hoshino Resorts has set 10 September 2027 as the opening date for Risonare Fukui, a 100-room resort hotel being built inside Katsuyama Dinosaur Forest in Fukui Prefecture. Reservations are expected to begin in April 2027. The announcement replaces the previous broad target of autumn 2027 with a specific date, although the hotel remains under construction and the timetable should still be treated as planned until operations begin.
The site is next to the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum in a public park managed by Katsuyama City. Plans show an eight-storey building with one basement level and approximately 12,684 square metres of floor space. Rooms will accommodate between one and six guests. The published facilities include a restaurant, café and lounge, children’s room, spa, pool, hot spring bathing and meeting space. A panoramic wellness floor at the top of the building is designed to look across the surrounding mountains and the Kuzuryu River.
The architecture is intended to connect the hotel with the park rather than resemble a city property placed beside a museum. Klein Dytham architecture has used a cylindrical form that Hoshino says was inspired by a pine cone, while the interiors will refer to geological layers and the ground beneath Katsuyama. Those ideas remain renderings and design descriptions for now. The more consequential feature is the location itself: guests will be able to stay within the same park as one of Japan’s leading dinosaur museums rather than making a day trip from another city.
This is also a public-private development project. Katsuyama is using Japan’s Park-PFI system, which allows selected private operators to build and run revenue-producing facilities in a public park while contributing to its management and improvement. A Hoshino Resorts subsidiary was selected as part of the operating group, and the company says it will participate in management across the park as well as run the hotel. The arrangement makes Risonare Fukui part of a wider destination plan, not simply a privately owned hotel on an unrelated site.
The city has been unusually clear about the problem it wants the project to address. In a June 2025 statement, the mayor said the dinosaur museum received about 1.26 million visitors a year and Ski Jam Katsuyama drew approximately 170,000 visitors during winter, but only around ten per cent stayed overnight in the city. These are figures cited by the city rather than an independent forecast, but they explain the economic logic: Katsuyama already attracts visitors and wants a larger share of them to remain for another day, eat locally and use other attractions.
Transport investment forms part of that calculation. Katsuyama has linked the park project to the Hokuriku Shinkansen extension to Fukui and Tsuruga, which opened in March 2024, and to continuing road improvements. The hotel itself lists parking but says its shuttle arrangements are still undecided. That detail will matter. A museum-centred family resort can encourage longer stays, but its relationship with the city depends partly on whether guests can move easily between the park, central Katsuyama, the railway and other mountain attractions.
The project has already had a longer timetable than first envisaged. Katsuyama selected the preferred operator in 2021, recognised the initial Park-PFI plan in 2022 and later moved the completion deadline from March 2026 into fiscal 2027 after approving changes to the hotel’s position. A groundbreaking ceremony was held on 31 March 2025. The new opening date is therefore meaningful evidence that the project has advanced, but it should not erase the history of revisions or be presented as a completed hotel.
Risonare Fukui will add a substantial branded accommodation base to a place better known for its museum and winter day trips. Its effect will be visible in practical measures: how many visitors convert a museum visit into an overnight stay, whether demand spreads beyond school holidays, and whether restaurants and businesses outside the park benefit. The confirmed target date gives Katsuyama and prospective visitors a clearer point to plan around; the first full year of operation will show whether the public-private model succeeds in turning traffic into a broader local stay.