Prezident Otel' — Hotel in Ufa

I travelled to Ufa in July for a family wedding and stayed 1 night at the hotel. The road to the airport takes ca.25-30 minutes, if the traffic is low.||||The building looks ridiculous from outside - it's a huge, but ugly hangar underneath a red roof (size over architecture, I guess). The surroundings are great, though - a large pine forest with a magnificent river view. There's also a restaurant there, that is often used for weddings, and a bar inside the building.||||The swimming-pool 24 hours a day is advertised, however, the hotel guide-book says it's only open till 4 p.m. (quite a scam, in my opinion). Since I checked-in later, I couldn't use it. The receptionist told me it would be open at midnight. ||||The standard room I was given was really small and narrow. Enough space for 1 person, still. The all-white bathroom is ok, but there were not enough shelves or surface to put my toiletries, not to mention cosmetics :) It was all clean and tidy, as was the room itself, including bed linen. ||||The trouble I had was with a safety box. I put my passport, camera and iPad inside and locked it with a familiar code - that was a former PIN-code of my card. However, I just couldn't open the box later. Of course, there's always a chance I was inputting a wrong code, but may be the box was out of order. I had situations like that in other places, and they always were solved within 5 minutes by someone with a key. But not this time. The receptionist told me that the guy with a key wouldn't come till Monday (it was Saturday, 8 p.m. - 8 hours before my plane). But, fortunately, after some waiting, they sent me a mechanic and another guy with crowbars, who simply broke open the safe and got my things. ||||Next thing that happened - the air-con was out of order, too. I called the receptionist and it sounded as if she had known of the problem, 'cause I was moved to another room.||||Didn't have any more troubles and left in the morning with a lunch-box (the breakfast starts later than my...

The President ticks most boxes for a business trip to Ufa for a foreigner. It is set within a large forested park with many footpaths and an outdoor restaurant, The Leto, within a short stroll of the hotel. The few from my room to the rear was across grassy woods and quite calming and very quiet. However, the bat sized mosquitos ruin any stroll or meal in the park or at Leto and I learned not to keep my window open after day one when I woke up with about 4 pints of blood missing.||There is a pool and sauna on the premises but I never sought them out.||The resident Scrooge Bar is a psychedelic hotch potch of pictures and random tall chairs and plastic squeaky butt chairs. It is better to eat in there than the Premier restaurant in the basement. There is an extensive buffet breakfast but the evening menu quality in general was disappointing, all the meat was tough in whatever I chose. If you're desperate though there is a McDonald's straight shot out of the hotel 5 minutes walk. Although take your translate App, as my request for a Big Mac Meal ended up being a Happy Meal with a plastic...

Typical soviet-era hotel.||My "business" room for 6100 rub. a day on the first floor was quite small. Smell of mould met me at the entrance of the room. The heating was so strong that the only way to sleep was to open the window. System of lighting was quite strange, I had to try hard to find out how to turn on the light in the bathroom. ||Breakfast is not bad due to a wide range of choice of the dishes. But avoid visiting the local restaurant (on the 2d floor) in the evening! We waited for 40 minutes for tea and 50 min. for a cup of coffee. When at last they brought our food - it was absolutely cold. The service is awful, the food is ordinary, the prices are metropolitan). And some girls of the unequivocal the oldest profession in the world are sitting at the bar each evening.||The only advantage is the small pine forest nearby - the air is fresh and you can meet some...