Postcard from Bishkek

Technically, a tourist is someone who spends at least one night away from home. That’s the lower limit.  There is an upper limit as well, but that tends to depends on who’s definition is being used.  One definition talks of someone travelling for up to a year, but more generally it seems to be up […]

A short while ago we did a short presentation of the hotel for a group of students following a Hotel Management course at one of Bishkek’s universities. As I understood the request, the idea may simply to get them out of the classroom and into a real hotel … it wasn’t clear how many of […]

We had an inquiry the other day from a client who wanted a single room in one of the hotels.  They had stayed with us before pm a previous visit to Kyrgyzstan and were about to pay a return visit and wrote to ask about availability and if we could give him our “best price”. […]

As a hotel, the main rationale of the guesthouse is Naryn is to provide accommodation for guests. As a result our rooms are our greatest asset. There is, actually, quite a story behind the rooms.  It’s a little complicated so I hope you’ll bear with me as I go through it.  IO think it will […]

I subscribe to a number of email newsletters and the start my day always involves perusing them to see what is new.  There are newsletters from a number of news agencies, alerting me to stories of interest about events here in Kyrgyzstan as well as back home, about different aspects of running a business, (such […]

I came across an article the other day: Will the real sustainable tourism certificate please stand up?  It struck me as particularly apposite as we in KATO, (the Kyrgyz Association of Tour Operators), under the auspices of a project funded by the European Union, are currently working on a series of quality standards and codes […]

There have been a number of interesting stories on the internet in recent weeks about strange and interesting hotels around the world.  They caught my eye because, of course, I am in that business. During the week, for example, I came across another one with an interesting title that caught my attention: “9 of the […]

Google Alerts are an interesting service provided by the internet giant Google. They use their search engine to monitor new pages posted on the internet and send an email when they find new results, (such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blog entries), that match the search term. For general queries like “Kyrgyzstan”, the email […]

We are often asked by tour operators for photographs of our guesthouse in Naryn  which they can send to their partners abroad.  We are always happy to oblige, of course, but a photograph can only give a partial impression of the building and its surroundings. When Victor Rehemyae showed us his 3D spherical panoramas, I […]

There’s been a lot of discussion on the internet recently about internet provision in hotels and, in my role as General Director of two hotels, I have been following the discussion with interest. The internet has become an important part of our daily lives, checking emails, and social networking sites, checking the news and following […]