Shahristan Plaza

This former caravanserai is right in the middle of the old town, a perfect place for exploring from. Our room (140) was in a newer part of the property on the first floor (one down from reception) & meant taking a flight of stairs down & then up again. This no step free access to this part of the building so be prepared to carry your luggage. The room itself was large with good air conditioning & WiFi connection. Unfortunately the safe didn’t work, but was quickly replaced (but the replacement was not secured & could easily be picked up to take contents away). The bathroom was ok, but the shower had a tendency to overflow, so just be careful. Breakfast was in a large room in the basement & was an impressive selection, lots of cakes as well as fruit & hot selections. If there are a lot of people then getting coffee can take time as despite there being two machines the staff insist on serving you & there is only one person on the coffee station & they only use one machine. We also feel that as we were just a couple and not able to speak Russian we were given a lower level of service, always being pushed to the back of a queue or allowed to be interrupted by other guests pushing in. The hotel though doesn’t make full use of its facilities, despite having a central courtyard there are no seats there, in fact there are only about six chairs on the verandas in total and they are outside bedrooms so feels a bit odd to sit there if it is not your room. There was a small courtyard outside our room but again no seats & we only had one chair in the room so couldn’t even use that to sit together outside. Despite the website saying there is a bar, there wasn’t, we were rudely told ‘if you want a drink go over the road’. And the restaurant was shut, supposedly opening again the week after our visit. We did find our way to the roof thanks to a very helpful member of staff, & there is work being done to open a rooftop restaurant, we used some chairs that the builders had left and had a wonderful view of the sunset over the old town. The new restaurant should be an asset. Overall the hotel is ok, needs to capitalise on the assets better, and treat all guests the same.