If you’re a short-term visitor, especially a foreigner, do NOT be fooled by the photos — I strongly recommend you avoid this hostel completely.
This place looks beautiful and modern in the pictures: nice public areas, clean-looking common spaces, and friendly, patient staff at the front desk. It tricks you into thinking “this must be a decent youth hostel for backpackers.”
In reality, it’s the worst “hostel” experience I had in over five months of backpacking.
This is not an international backpacker place for meeting people and socializing. It’s basically a cheap long-term local rental apartment + chaotic dorm hybrid.
Most guests are local long-term residents who treat the place like their own home.
* Hygiene is terrible: corridors and common areas are constantly cluttered with random stuff.
* Heavy smelly room, they don’t like take showers and smelly clothes&shoes, what’s more cigarette smell (even though smoking isn’t allowed indoors — they just come back reeking of smoke).
* Completely reversed sleep schedules: during the day the whole floor is dead silent (everyone sleeping), but from 10 PM until 4–5 AM people are sitting at desks watching movies, gaming, browsing, and chatting.
* Even worse: some people set extremely loud alarms in the morning but either sleep through them or can’t be bothered to turn them off. The alarm just rings non-stop for up to an hour.
On February 19, 2026, I finally snapped. Around 8 a.m. an alarm had been blaring for nearly 20 minutes straight. The guy (a local Kazakh man) had been up until 5 a.m. the night before watching movies at the desk instead of sleeping in his bed.
I got up, opened the curtain to wake him and angrily said something like: “If you can’t get up, don’t set an alarm that wakes the whole room.”
We exchanged a few insults. Instead of apologizing, he got furious, jumped out of bed, pushed me hard, knocked me back onto the bed, and squared up like he wanted to fight.
The absurdity: he was the one with zero consideration and disturbing everyone, yet he acted like he was the victim for being woken up.
Management seems to allow these long-term locals to stay without any filtering. Short-term travelers (especially foreigners) end up feeling like outsiders who have to adapt to their chaotic lifestyle and schedules.
(By the way, the low-quality local guy is in Room 3, bed 20. He seems to be a long-term resident — avoid Room 3 if possible.)
To repeat: if you’re a short-term traveler or foreigner, do not let the nice photos fool you. This is not a proper youth hostel for international backpackers.
It’s a low-budget local long-stay chaos dorm. Pay a bit more and stay somewhere else — it’s not worth ruining your trip, your mood, and your sleep.
(Yes, the reception staff are genuinely nice and helpful — but that cannot make up for the disastrous living environment.)
Hope this review saves someone else from the same terrible experience.