French hotel giant Accor has signed an agreement to open its first hotel in Tajikistan.

A Swissôtel 243-room property within an 18-floor building, located in the the centre of the capital Dushanbe, will debut in 2028. The hotel will also feature two restaurants, a café, rooftop bar, conference rooms and a ballroom.

Alexis Delaroff, chief operating officer of Accor New East Europe, said: “I am grateful to our partners for their trust and hope that the signing of our flagship hotel in Dushanbe will become the start of many exciting new projects in Tajikistan.”

CoStar’s Hotel News Now on December 11 reported that investors remain hesitant to put money into Central Asia hotels despite positive trends. The future of the hospitality industry in most parts of the region remains vague given a combination of political, infrastructural and environmental challenges, it said.

“It is unlikely a large number of foreign players will queue up to pump money in most countries of Central Asia until local government establish ‘transparent and permanent rules of the game’,” the news server quoted Marina Smirnova, head of the hospitality and tourism industry department at Commonwealth Partnership, a Moscow-based consultancy, as saying.

She added that restrictions on foreign citizens’ purchase of land and real estate need to be lifted for the hotel industry to start unravelling the region’s potential.

Alexey Vishnevsky, front office manager of the Dostyk Hotel in the Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, was reported as noting that regional hotel occupancy has been spurred by Russia's war with Ukraine, with the Russian mobilisation prompting, for example, approximately 400,000 Russians to flee to Kazakhstan.

By 2025, Kazakhstan plans to attract 2.5mn tourists per year, compared with 1mn in 2022, according to Kazakh Tourism.

Smirnova was also cited as observing that in recent years, Kazakhstan has actively promoted its Caspian Sea coast to foreign travellers, but with little success.

“The Caspian Sea has a number of disadvantages, a muddy bottom, a specific water colour and, in addition, frequent cases of E. coli infection,” she told the trade publication.

Svetlana Balakina, general manager at Dilimah Premium Luxury Hotel in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, told Hotel News Now that the prices of air tickets to Uzbekistan are exceptionally high for tourists from Europe and America.

She also pointed out that the inflow of new investors into the Uzbek hotel industry has become so strong that there is even a risk of oversupply on the market”.