I stayed at the Hotel Kazakhstan in Almaty with a colleague in the last week of January 2012. Ours was a business trip and the hotel fees were paid on our behalf, so I cannot comment on its value for money.

Our rooms on the 12th floor were well furnished with comfortable beds. The water for the shower (no bath) was not always hot , the windows could have been cleaner, and the wireless connection was not completely reliable, but otherwise the rooms were good. Good views to the mountains would have been had, except that the visibility was poor pretty much throughout our stay. (Air quality in Almaty is not good – perhaps that was the reason our rooms were equipped with gas masks?)

The hotel lobby is impressive and it was good to eat breakfast on a balcony overlooking the lobby area. Breakfast itself was unexceptional – the usual standard breakfast buffet. The “hot food” choice varied from day to day, although it was never hot.

The staff at the hotel were most helpful and even the security staff were friendly. (One has to pass through a metal detector and open one’s bags before being admitted to the lobby area.)

The hotel has several bars and restaurants attached. We tried the Guns ‘n’ Roses pub, Noodles, and Bar Fly, but not the Cosmopolitan Bar nor the poker casino at the back of the hotel.

Bar Fly on the 26th floor had a pleasant ambience and would have been worth the high price of our drinks if the view had been good.

Noodles was good – we ate there several times – an international menu with plenty of vegetarian options and large, good quality pizzas.

The Guns ‘n’ Roses pub has been reviewed elsewhere on Tripadvisor. We ate there twice and it has a limited vegetarian menu, but was generally fine. We also listened to the live music on a Saturday night. On that occasion we were charged for entry (which included our first drink). The music was loud (the sound proofing seems to be very good in the hotel generally) and we witnessed rather too much vodka binge drinking by Russian-speaking twenty-somethings.

We were told that the Kazakhstan was a showpiece Soviet hotel built in the 1970s for Communist Party bigwigs and foreign dignitaries. It’s been refitted since then, of course, but still retains some of its original grandeur. It’s clearly a national icon since it has appeared on a Kazakhstan banknote: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KazakhstanPNew-5000Tenge-2006-donatedTA_b.jpg