An 80s Era Room & Excellent Lamb Cutlets: A Review Of Ak Bulak Hotel

This title may not have been how I thought I’d start this review, but there you have it. Ak Bulak Hotel is great for its location of being directly beneath a ski resort, but sometimes you have to focus on the unexpected highlights.

If you’re planning to venture out to Ak Bulak Ski Resort then you might want to look into staying the night. At approximately 1 hour 10 min to reach Ak Bulak, its the furthest of the Almaty resorts, and while its doable as a day trip, its quite nice to wake up and be able to roll out the door straight to the slopes. The hotel is in quite a pretty building and has a good location at the base of the resort. It has the added bonus at this ski resort of containing the only modern toilets you can use for free (guests only of course!).

Ak Bulak Hotel’s location is good

The hotel is just below the base of the slope. You can reach the slopes either by exiting via the locker room (the hotel restaurant also has an exit to this area) and boarding the magic carpet up to the base, or else walking up the bridge to the bunny slope which has a button lift on it. If you don’t have a ski pass yet you’ll need to visit the Kasse (cashier) first though. If you’ve taken the magic carpet then turn right and walk up along the slope towards the large building which is about 50m away. The building houses the cash desk, as well as the ski rental shop, the ski school and some restaurants. The cashier is on the side of this building facing up the slope.

A man stands to the side in the foreground looking out at Ak Bulak Ski resort with the entrance of a magic carpet lift in near distance — Looking out the doorway of the hotel’s locker room, you can see the magic carpet lift you enter to reach the slopes. From the top its a short walk to the cashier and the main lifts.

You can also reach this building if you leave the hotel via the front door and turn left, walk along the icy road and then up the wooden stairs. These stairs bring you to the point where the instructors like to wait for their students.

The timings of the hotel

Check in and check out at Ak Bulak hotel are pretty standard. You can check in at 2pm but they’re quite strict about it. We arrived 20 min earlier and the guy at reception made us wait till 2pm on the dot. Check out is at 12.00.

Breakfast is at 8.30am. This is a relatively late start for a family resort, I think. Indeed when we got to the restaurant at 8.27am there were 4-5 other family groups there and they were already eating. I suspect the staff prepare breakfast earlier than the official time to cater to the crowd. Even so, there was a rush. We had to feed our kids and then get them kitted out and up to the ski school for their 9.00 lessons. This was a bit more intense than it needed to be. It would be great if they could start breakfast from 8.00.

The rooms

The rooms here are bigger than other ski resort rooms we’ve stayed at, which makes sense given the extra space they have here at Ak Bulak. We had room 220, which was above the reception on the second floor. Our view was out the front of the hotel, looking down the slope toward the steppe.

The room itself was large, and had enough space for a double bed and a sofa bed. The sofa hadn’t been made up when we checked in but housekeeping visited while we were at the pool. The sofa bed didn’t look the most comfortable but the children slept fine on it for that one night. The large tv didn’t work, but this might be more to do with all the appliances being unplugged when we arrived. Even the phone was unplugged. We really didn’t have the patience to check it all and plug it all in properly. The room was a bit on the warm side but we slept well enough. The room was charmingly decorated as if we were back in the 80s. I’m pretty sure a school friend’s living room was decorated like this growing up in regional Western Australia. I loved it.

A room at Ak Bulak Hotel, decorated in an 80s style — I can’t get over how cutely retro this room at Ak Bulak Hotel is! The sofa at the end was made up into a bed while we were out. The kids slept there quite comfortably

There was also a large bathroom complete with bath and heated towel rack. It was more modern looking than the room, leading me to think it had been redone recently. I am a master of deduction.

Facilities

Ak Bulak Hotel has decent facilities for its location. There is a restaurant, karaoke bar (which we unfortunately didn’t visit), pool and spa, ski locker, and of course a private car park.

A lovely pool

There is a magnificent indoor pool, which is large and well-maintained. It used to be available to day guests but now only hotel guests can use it. This is probably a good thing for the hotel guests! There is a small kiosk inside where you can get pots of tea. I suspect the lack of food in the kiosk cabinet is due to smaller crowds now that day guests can’t access the pool anymore. There is a spa next to the pool area, offering the usual massages and other treatments. The spa room is located just before the kiosk. We swam for a while and then headed downstairs to the sauna to warm up. Note that the hotel doesn’t provide pool towels. Luckily we had brought our own.

Restaurant

The restaurant is down the corridor to the left of reception, and is a large room with lots of space and many tables. We stayed on a Saturday night but at dinner it was pretty empty, so we thought there were probably not many guests. However, compared to local families we do eat early, so the crowd may have arrived after we left. The food was fine and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the lamb cutlets. My husband ordered them, and, as a good provider does, offered them to us. My son and I both took a cutlet from his plate and devoured them. Our own dishes were also ok (spaghetti bolognese and mushroom pizza) but those cutlets were the stand out.

At breakfast the restaurant was about a third full. As mentioned above, breakfast officially starts at 8.30am but it seems that the staff are aware of the practicality of an early start time. So you can probably arrive a bit earlier and start eating. There is a door directly out to the slopes, so after finishing you can head outside from there. Otherwise you can follow the corridor back around to the reception to reach the locker room.

Ski Locker

There was a room with ski lockers next to reception. The lockers were tall and quite narrow, so they did not fit all our equipment, but probably would be fine for 2 people. The locker came with a lock and key, which I believe was complimentary. The room was (naturally!) full whenever we were in there, and there were quite a few families!

Tthe locker room opens up fabulously close to one of the many magic carpet lifts at Ak Bulak. From the top of this magic carpet there was a short walk to the main chair lifts.

Carpark

There is an uncovered car park with complimentary parking for guests down the driveway from the hotel. You are able to drive right up to the hotel entrance to drop off your bags and family before parking. The carpark is outside the building which houses the ice skating rink. The rink was unfortunately covered and not in use when we checked it out.

How to get to Ak Bulak Hotel

Ak Bulak Hotel is just over an hour’s drive east of Almaty, depending on traffic. Given its distance, you’ll probably want to drive or take a taxi, rather than take the bus. The bus would take you more than 2 hours. If that doesn’t bother you, you can take bus 224 from Silk Way City on Tole Bi St.

I checked Yandex taxi (they have an app for both IOS and Google) and, on midday Sunday, a comfort class taxi will set you back around 6,500KZT (13USD) one way.

Guests at the hotel get complimentary parking if you wish to drive.

What do I know about Ak Bulak?

I’ve been living here and visiting Almaty ski resorts since mid 2021 with my family, though as of February 2025 I’ve only visited Ak Bulak twice! Visit my About Me page to understand more about my perspective. And check out my Kazakhstan page to find out more about why I think why you should travel to Kazakhstan!

Also take a look at my other posts on skiing in Kazakhstan!