Hotels in Uzbekistan: international-brand rooms are being added faster than tourists

Demand: how many people come and from where

According to the National Statistics Committee, 11,622,103 foreign citizens visited the country for tourism in January–October 2026 (+19.4%, almost 1.9 million more).

Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan together account for 78.8% of arrivals. Russia, China, Türkiye and India add about 1.8 million. According to the Tourism Committee’s nine-month results, long-haul markets are growing fastest: visitors from China rose 2.1 times, from Malaysia 1.9 times, from Japan 1.5 times, from the United States 1.4 times, and from Germany and the United Kingdom by 25%.

Exports of tourism services in January–September 2026 reached $5.3bn (+51.2%). The country’s airports handled 8.15 million passengers in the first half of the year (+16%), of whom 6.7 million flew internationally (+15.4%).

How to read this. The statistics count arrivals for tourism, not hotel guests. What share of arrivals from neighbouring countries stay in hotels is not published. For an international-brand hotel in Tashkent, long-haul markets, air passengers and business travel are closer to real demand than total arrivals.

Tashkent

According to the city administration, Tashkent received 3.2 million foreign and 4.1 million domestic tourists in the first half of 2026. Over that period 140 new accommodation facilities opened in the city: 31 hotels, 83 hostels, 16 family guest houses and 10 facilities of other categories. Official statistics do not publish occupancy or average room rates for Tashkent hotels.

Supply: a wave of international brands

According to the Centre for Certification of Tourism Services, the international-brand hotel network in Uzbekistan grew as follows in seven months of 2026:

New projects are appearing not only in Tashkent but also in Bukhara, Samarkand, Nukus, Termez and the mountain resorts. All accommodation in the country at the end of July 2026: 7,440 facilities with 202,600 beds; 705 facilities with 22,296 beds were added in seven months, about +12% in beds since the start of the year.

What follows

Foreign arrivals in January–July 2026 grew 22.6% on the previous year, while the room stock of international brands grew 28.4% in those seven months alone.

The figures are not fully comparable: tourists are counted over a period, rooms on a date. The direction is clear, though: at the top of the market supply is growing no slower than demand, and most arrivals come from neighbouring countries whose share of hotel nights is unknown.

Without open data on occupancy and average room rates, a hotel project cannot be assessed from general arrival statistics. What is needed is competitive-set data: occupancy, average rate and revenue per room for the five to seven nearest hotels of the same class.