ALMATY NEW OPENINGS
Twenty-one hotels are under construction across Almaty with combined investment near ₸300 billion. Six branded projects will add about 800 rooms by 2028 — led by a Vignette Collection on the airport road and a 40-storey St. Regis tower — while the Almaty SuperSki resort targets a December 2028 opening.
IHG’s Vignette Collection Almaty — 95 rooms, developed by Hayat Construction / Meliora on the airport road near Kok-Tobe — is scheduled to open in the first half of 2027 and will be the brand’s Kazakhstan debut. The St. Regis Almaty, roughly 200 rooms inside a 40-storey mixed-use tower at Seifullin × Temiryazev, anchors the upper-upscale end. Together with four further branded projects, about 800 rooms are in the visible pipeline — meaningful against today’s 2,567 chain-room base, and still modest against 69.5 percent occupancy.
The incumbents set the bar the newcomers must clear: The Ritz-Carlton Almaty (145 rooms, Esentai Tower, open since 2013) remains the luxury reference, with Rixos Almaty (237 rooms, 2009) and Holiday Inn Express (184 rooms) covering upper-mid and midscale. Beyond the city, Almaty SuperSki — 11 cableways engineered by POMA to a Foster + Partners masterplan — targets a December 2028 opening and would re-rate the entire region’s winter inventory, converting Almaty from a city break with a mountain backdrop into a genuine ski metropolis.
THE TIO READ
For a decade Almaty’s luxury map was one tower — Esentai. The 2027–2028 wave ends that monopoly. The risk is timing, not demand: if several flag hotels and SuperSki land in the same eighteen months, the city gets a step-change in both capacity and international visibility. The TIO read: the pipeline is real, financed and — unusually for the region — mostly branded.
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