Aster Hotel Group — Hotel in Tashkent

I called the Toshkant location and negotiated a price for a 3 night stay. The guy I spoke to Dec 17 2021 (the hotel can check who was working) told me he had to “check with his manager” about the price. Well for 2 days this same guy phoned me 3 times and he said the manager finally agreed to the price. The time we spent talking was 2 hours. Relived that we found a hotel to stay at for the next 3 days, I reiterated the price and this guy said “no, that’s the price for ONE day.” WTF? This guy knew since the beginning of our phone conversations knew I was negotiating a 3-day stay. And even if he thought he was being clever in saying the price we negotiated was for a 1 day stay, why would I want to pay higher that what the Aster hotel—- and ANY other hotel in Toshkant was advertising for for 1 night? That’s like saying 1 apple costs 2 SOMS. I want 3 so I will give you 5 SOMS and the vendor tells you— after 2 hours and several phone calls over the course of 2 days—- “ok we agree: give me 5 SOMS for ONE apple”! These guys are swindling time-wasters. Maybe because it’s low travel season, they feel they can waste people’s time and cheat them. Maybe he thought I would just roll over because I had spent so much time with him on the phone. Well, I’m a very experienced traveller and had back up hotels. I’m also a WOMAN who has been to over 125 countries and know this $&&@ game this guy plays. Luring, lying, greed, and cheating is against the PILLARS of ISLAM! Well, we ended up staying at ANOTHER Toshkant hotel for 3 nights for the price I negotiated with Aster in the beginning. And Aster, for those 3 nights, remained EMPTY. BEWARE of...

Positive :||- comfortable room||- in quiet district||- the man at the front desk on morning of departure was really nice, it made up a little for the others - see below||||Issues :||- the man at the reception on the day of our arrival was extremely unpleasant, almost rude. He clearly does not think much of serving clients. ||- he first tried to sell us a more expensive room because it was noon and check out was 2pm, and "it was not yet ready". We showed a copy of the email where the hotel had accepted we could get into our room early for no charge, but he still refused. After insisting again, he gave us the room which was fully ready, so he had lied to us.||- when we came in the evening to settle our account, he asked us to pay for the full room. I told him we had already been debited a month before and showed him my bank account statement. He said this was only a guarantee and that we would be reimbursed of that.||- a month later, we have not been reimbursed and they tell us to deal with Booking||- the staff at the restaurant is not taking care of clients : you have to get up and fetch the menu yourself, and look for them all the time as they are not available. Same for breakfast where staff was grim looking. Service is very long. ||- breakfast was of lower quality and choice than all the others we had in the country||- hotel equipment not on par with the price (no swimming pool, no...

A very new, super clean and well built hotel, friendly and helpful staff and really great breakfast buffet with lots of choice, freshly prepared dishes and good quality produce. ||Before arriving to Tashkent we had emailed with the hotel in order to organise a pick up taxi at the airport, but found it difficult to get a reply back. We had to prompt replies and answers to our questions several times by calling them on the phone asking them to check their email. Have found lack of email replies to be a general problem in Uzbekistan though - maybe, coming from a London, we also have very high expectations on the speediness if email replies. But basically, we arrived at the airport without actually having received email confirmation that there would be a taxi to pick us up. ||But all in all a very good stay and we have considered staying at the hotel again on our return to Tashkent once finishing our...