I did indeed distinctly get the impression that complaining about things was not on.
1. On arrival, we thought we would use the monorail to look around whilst we waited on our room. We were a bit surprised to find you had to pay for the monorail unlike in the US (apparently they only made this change at the end of March, I have not seen it mentioned anywhere). I didn't really mind paying as it was very cheap, but then they told us the ticket machines only accepted cash. This was the only place we found n our 12 day trip that did not accept credit cards. The staff at the monorail station said there was an ATM in the hotel and we could get cash there. So we went back to the hotel and asked where the ATM was and they said there wasn't one. I asked where the nearest one was and they said that there was one in the park or at the next monorail station. I said we needed cash to buy a monorail ticket and how could I do that if there was no ATM. At this point they were stumped and I asked to speak to a manager, which horrified them. They disappeared and after five minutes came back saying that they would escort us onto the monorail. This was in fairness a great solution. My later complaint was why did the monorail not take credit cards like even the smallest store in Japan and why was I directed to a non existent ATM by staff in the station attached to the hotel.
2. On the first day we wanted to buy post 5pm tickets for the park. Pre trip I had found we could buy tickets in the hotel. We went to the ticket desk in the hotel and they said to buy them on the app. I tried to buy them on the app and it failed every time. I tried six different credit cards Mastercard, Visa and Amex and none worked. I knew that there were sometimes payment issues but this seemed weird. It was made very frustrating by the slow Wi-Fi (I did have 4G available as back up). The speed was around 4Mbps and the latency was very high, 50-150ms. Also it was quite patchy and for example did not work in the restaurant and didn't work well everywhere in the room. In comparison we stayed in 4 Hilton group hotels on the rest of the trip and they all had over 100Mbps Wi-Fi. Anyway, after trying this I found a member of staff and asked if we could go to the gate and buy the evening tickets. they didn't know. They went away to speak to someone else and came back saying they couldn't find an answer. Eventually I found online that these tickets are only available on the app. I also found online that the app locks out foreign credit card holders from buying park tickets. I was able to buy Premier Access on the app. It seemed that buying park tickets was the issue. To get this fixed you have to call a phone line only open between 10am and 3pm (according to online commenters this was still not guaranteed to work). So we lost our first evening in the park and I was able to buy whole day tickets the rest of the trip at the desk.
So the staff did not know the issue with foreigners not being able to buy tickets in the app or where you could and could not buy specific tickets. They only sell a few kinds of ticket so why some are not available in the hotel escapes me.
3. The one that really annoyed me was check in. Frankly a lot of the issues seemed to stem from strict adherence to pointless rules. One of these is 3pm check in. I did not plan on early check in, but it would have been nice. No one was allowed to into rooms early. They took all your information and gave you a piece of paper to pick up your room key later. Fair enough, 3pm is check in. Except the piece of paper we got said we could pick our room key up at 430pm. So absolute strict adherence to the rule, unless of course it suits them to give you a worse service than the rule should provide. No apology or anything just tough. Apparently the lobby is a mess at 3pm. The rooms obviously aren't all ready simultaneously at 3pm so it would actually help the hotel to let people check in as rooms become free, reducing the 3pm bottleneck in the lobby.
4. I knew that they charge to use the pool facilities in Japan, it never occurred to me to check if it would actually be open in summer, in winter I would have checked. It wasn't a big deal that it wasn't open, but it was so bizarre I wanted to mention it to them. The hotel is full all year and full of kids, but both the indoor and outdoor pools are only open during the Japanese summer holidays. Hard luck if your country has holidays at a different date or you have young kids not at school or if you are just an adult who wants to use the pool.
As you say I really felt that as foreigners we were just a nuisance to them. Many of the rules seem to have been designed on the assumption that everyone is local and seem to have little logic behind them. From a business perspective this is not great as considering how cheap it is, and how great the parks are, they could massive ely increase the number of overseas visitors.
