Home /Guides /Five Call Themselves a Cottage, Six a Rental Villa: The Words Stays Do Not Put in Their Names
Five Call Themselves a Cottage, Six a Rental Villa: The Words Stays Do Not Put in Their Names
In Amakusa, Kumamoto, there is a stay called Kashibessou Vigan Ocean Villa.
Its name carries both bessou, the Japanese word for a holiday house let out to guests, and villa, standing side by side. You wonder for a moment why it did not have to pick one.
Line up the names of all 654 listings and count, and this one turns out to be unusual. Only six stays in total put bessou in their name.
Only two words get used as names
We counted which words appear in the 654 facility names.
| Word in the name | Stays | Split |
|---|---|---|
| Villa | 168 | 159 villas, 9 glamping |
| Glamping | 127 | 8 villas, 119 glamping |
| Bessou (holiday house) | 6 | 6 villas |
| Cottage | 5 | 4 villas, 1 glamping |
| Ittoudashi (whole-house rental) | 3 | 3 villas |
| Lodge, bungalow | 0 |
The top two and the bottom three are an order of magnitude apart. Villa and glamping are claimed by 168 and 127 stays; cottage and bessou by five and six. Lodge and bungalow appear nowhere in all 654 names.
In the searcher’s head these six words sit roughly level with one another. Searching “Chiba cottage” feels like looking for something different from “Chiba rental villa.” On the properties’ side, they are not level at all.
Used in explanation, never as a name
We counted the same words again, this time inside the summaries and body text rather than the names.
| Word | In the name | In the text | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Villa | 168 | 281 | 1.7x |
| Glamping | 127 | 317 | 2.5x |
| Cottage | 5 | 63 | 12.6x |
| Bessou | 6 | 76 | 12.7x |
| Ittoudashi | 3 | 155 | 51.7x |
For villa and glamping, the number that name themselves and the number that use the word are close. The places that made it their name go on using the same word in prose.
Cottage and bessou open up more than twelve-fold. The word comes out when explaining, never when naming. Ittoudashi runs to 51.7 times, with only three stays putting it in a name.
What a place calls itself and what it explains itself with come from different drawers.
Why they never become names
Split the three wide-gap words by type and it becomes clear.
Of the 63 stays whose text mentions cottage, 48 are glamping. It appears as one room type alongside tents and domes, as “cottage unit” or “cottage type.” It describes a kind of building inside the grounds, not the business itself. No wonder it is not a name: the name of the property and the type of the building sit on different levels.
Of the 76 whose text mentions bessou, 62 are villas, the other way round. Here it comes up when explaining where the building came from: a house built as a holiday home, now let to guests. A provenance is hard to turn into a name.
Ittoudashi is plainer still. It names not a kind of building but a way of renting. A villa, a restored farmhouse, a machiya townhouse all become whole-house rentals in the way they are let. A way of renting does not become a name.
More than half claim nothing at all
359 of the 654 put none of these words in their name. That is 55%.
Split by type, 148 of 321 villas (46%) and 211 of 333 glamping sites (63%). Glamping is the less likely to state a category in its name.
What is left is a proper name and nothing else. R;MOGAMI in Yamagata, CODE ROOMS ITOSHIMA in Fukuoka, The Lobs at Lake Toya. From none of them can you tell whether it is a tent or a house.
The shortest name is three characters, Mori no Yado, the inn in the forest. The longest runs to 48. The median across 654 is 16.
The names are built differently by type
The words they claim do not separate the two types, but the construction of the names does.
By script, villas most often mix Japanese with Latin letters: 198 of them, 61%. A Latin name with the Japanese reading appended, as in “Seaside KLATCH.” Glamping most often uses Japanese alone: 151, or 45%.
Length differs too. The median is 19 characters for villas and 13 for glamping.
A place name appears in 134 of 654 names (20%), split 86 villas (27%) and 48 glamping (14%). Villas are the ones that write where they are.
The most common English word is THE, in 41 names, followed by RESORT with 32 and HOUSE with 17.
Seventeen where the name and the listing disagree
Tomaribi files tents and domes as glamping, and whole houses let to one group as villas. Seventeen stays disagree with that filing in their own name.
Nine are filed as glamping yet have villa in the name, among them Nihonkai Yuhi Villa One Story and Setouchi Hamaya Villa.
Eight go the other way, filed as villas with glamping in the name, including THE BASE GLAMPING ATAMI PREMIER and Sauna & Glamping Totonoi.
Neither side is wrong. A building can be a villa while the shape of the stay leans toward glamping, and the name follows the stay. It works in reverse as well. A name does not necessarily point at the building.
About these figures
We counted mechanically across the 654 stays listed on Tomaribi, 321 villas and 333 glamping sites, looking at facility names and at summary and body text. “Villa” was matched as a word so that VILLAGE does not count, and the spelling variants in Japanese and Latin script were pooled.
Names are exactly as each property writes them on its official site. The body text is written by our editors from official sources, so “used in the text” does not mean the property said it. It means the word was needed in order to describe the place.
Script was sorted three ways by whether Latin letters and Japanese characters are present. A place name counts as present when a municipality or prefecture name from the address appears in the name.
Names will not narrow it down
Cottage, bessou and villa do carry different meanings as words. We set them out in the difference between villas, glamping, cottages and rental holiday houses.
Those differences do not reach the names. Filter on cottage and five remain; filter on bessou and six do. In neither case is the stay you are looking for among them.
When a name comes to mind, search by it. Otherwise, party size, destination and features get you there faster. Search by criteria narrows across both types at once.
A name says how a place wants to be seen. What kind of stay it is, the criteria answer.
FAQ
- What is the difference between a cottage, a bessou and a villa?
- In the names, almost none. Of 654 listings, five put cottage in the name and six put bessou, the Japanese word for a holiday house, against 168 for villa. Whichever you type when searching, the stays that come back overlap heavily.
- Where is the word cottage actually used, then?
- Inside the descriptions. 63 stays mention a cottage in their text, and 48 of those are glamping sites. It appears as one room type alongside tents and domes, never as the name of the business itself.
- Is bessou an outdated way of putting it?
- Less outdated than used somewhere else. Of the 76 whose text mentions bessou, 62 are villas, and it comes up when explaining where the building came from. Only six put it in the name, and two of those also carry the word villa in the same name.
- Can you tell what kind of stay it is from the name?
- More than half the time, no. 359 of 654 (55%) put no category word in the name at all and use a proper name only. Among glamping sites that rises to 63%. The name is not where the type gets stated.
- Is it better to search by name or by criteria?
- By name when a property comes to mind, otherwise by criteria. Category words are barely present on the properties' side, so filtering on cottage or bessou drops most of what you want. Party size, area and features land closer to the real options.
Stays in this article
AmakusaKumamoto
貸別荘 ヴィガン・オーシャンヴィラ
An orange two-storey villa on a cape in Kamiamakusa, its Provence-styled rooms looking over the Ariake Sea, with a balcony open-air bath, a fire pit and a BBQ terrace.
Yakushima IslandKagoshima
Cottage Views(コテージビューズ)屋久島
A fan-shaped cottage standing alone on roughly 3,000 sqm in southern Yakushima. Designed by an architect resident on the island, its windows frame the view like paintings.
ShimodaShizuoka
伊豆下田の一棟貸別荘「碧(あい)ai」
A large one-group-per-day rental house eight minutes on foot from Izukyu-Shimoda Station. It has a 40-mat living room, a sauna taking six with loyly, and a 70-mat roof deck with BBQ and a jacuzzi.
4 bd
AzuminoNagano
三角屋根の貸別荘 Villa Yoshino(安曇野)
Gable-roofed rental houses in the forest at Ariake in Azumino. Four houses across three types each have a private bath fed straight from a North Alps source, and every terrace has a built-in BBQ grill.
Kusatsu OnsenGunma
草津温泉付き貸別荘 永田屋 昭和館
A four-bedroom rental house at Kusatsu Onsen with the Watanoyu source piped into the room, a spring drawn by only a handful of inns. One tatami room downstairs and three upstairs.
4 bd1 ba