Uganda Hotel Scene :: More Places to Stay in Kampala Than There are Hills

September 2, 2008 at 4:39 PM | 0 Comments

HotelChatter's newest contributing editor Scarlett Lion is filing her stories from Uganda. Every now and then, she'll be sending us dispatches about the hotel scene here. Got questions? Send 'em to us and we'll get them answered. Enjoy.

People have been known to call Kampala, Uganda's capital city, a city of seven hills but it's not really true.

It's a hilly city, but the number seven doesn't correspond to all the swells of land with luxury homes at their peaks, nor are there seven valleys, flooded and filled with slum dwellers.

In fact, it's hard to count just about anything in Kampala. Estimates of population vary from 1.5 million people to 4 million. Estimates of the number of hotels that have besieged the city of late are also difficult to come by.

The Kampala Sheraton led the way and opened one of the first luxury hotels in Kampala, though its amenities now look drab in comparison to the crop of newbies marking the Kampala skyline.

And before that was the once-luxurious, now more of a faded star than a five star Grand Imperial. The most well-known lux location in Kampala is the Serena, but it has to share guests with Emin Pasha, and the still incomplete-yet-taking-guests Imperial Royale.

As numerous as the hills and as difficult to measure as the population are a new set of hotels catering to a demographic that didn't used to make it south of the Sahara: the business hotel.

They offer basic amenities at a mid-range cost, without fancy restaurants or swimming pools like the Luxury Big Boys. But Uganda's economy is growing at about seven percent per annum, and there are a whole lot of people coming to town to capture their piece of the Africa pie and they need somewhere to stay.

These basic-but-nice homes away from homes often don't have their own website, but many are listed on Uganda Hotels website, a good place to start when considering one of these types of hotels.

[Photo: Peter Price]

Tags: Uganda Hotel Scene / Kampala Hotels / Uganda Hotels / Business Hotels

by ScarlettLion

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