Safi Landmark Hotel & Suites

Great hotel in wonderful location Well equipped comfortable room with all amenities. Fast and reliable WiFi, fantastic view. Very good security, friendly and helpful staff with excellent English language skills and high professionalism. The hotel is in walking distance to fantastic 24/7 restaurant Bukhara.

All bags are x-rayed at the entrance. Male guests are scanned with a handheld device and/or patted down. Female guests are scanned or patted down if the female security person is working which in my experience was just once in all entries during my 3 nights at the hotel. The entrance is labyrinthine involving a couple of turns and several sets of very heavy (bulletproof glass?) doors. This all seemed like useful security precautions given the attacks on hotels during the previous governments. Once through to reception everything looks like a pretty standard hotel. I stayed on two separate occasions with both rooms being fairly similar. The rooms are set around two central atria. There also seems to be a shopping mall of sorts occupying the floors above one of the atria. I couldn’t work out how it was accessed and could only see a few shops. There are 2 lifts only 1 of which was working over my 2 visits. The rooms were small with a bigger bed than is necessary for a single guest and that crowds out the room. That said, the beds were very comfortable, especially after some of the solid mattresses found in hotels and guest houses outside the capital. The only windows were up high above the bed and in one case were sealed shut. Each room had a safe and a non-working mini-fridge. There is a generator for the intermittent power cuts and the wifi worked pretty well all things considered. The hot water was patchy with none on a couple of occasions but I was later told that it needed to be run for a very extended period to allow the heated water to travel through from the single hot water unit. Breakfast was served on the 7th floor and was pretty minimal. Eggs to order and a few other dishes. There is a shusha lounge on the roof. The Landmark is centrally located and within walking distance of Chicken Street and a nice park that is only open to men. I felt safe and will return when next back in Kabul.

We were nervous about staying here as many of the reviews didn’t seem genuine. Entering the hotel via an obstacle course shopping mall entry didn’t provide a good impression either. Security not great. But location is very central and also close to the airport. Reception staff very friendly and helpful. Unfortunately, there are often smoking backpackers camped out in the lobby of this hotel waiting for late night buses or accessing the WIFI. (WIFI codes keep logging you out when using the Internet from your room.) We were in a junior suite for three nights. The lay out was spacious and the room was very clean. The beds were comfortable and free laundry was a plus and mitigated somewhat the indignity of women being charged 2-3 times the price of identical male laundry items. The air conditioning didn’t work well. The breakfast on the 7th floor was pitiful. It’s a large cavernous un air-conditioned room with some cucumber and tomatoes withering in the heat. Hot food included a choice of egg dishes, bean/tomato mash, naan bread with cream or jam. The women’s area is at the hottest, farthest point and means a long walk to food. Ultimately, lack of WIFI, air conditioning, poor food facilities, and gender discrimination caused us to go elsewhere.