Place to stay · Gaborone
Gaborone Hotel
A plain 44-room hotel on the edge of Gaborone's central bus terminal, close to the railway station. Useful for an early bus or a late arrival, not for a holiday stay.
The Gaborone Hotel sits at Plot 37799 on the central bus terminal, which locals call the bus rank, with the railway station and a shopping mall close by. It has 44 rooms and sells itself on price and position. If you are catching a morning bus to Francistown, or you get into town late, it is the nearest bed to the buses.
What to expect
A simple town hotel. Rooms come with air conditioning, a television, a telephone and wifi, and there is a laundry service. Meals are in the hotel’s own GH Restaurant. The hotel also lets out rooms for meetings and functions.
You stay here for the bus rank on the doorstep, and a bus rank is not a quiet neighbour. Light sleepers should pack earplugs.
Practical details
- Phone: +267 392 2777. WhatsApp: +267 71 747 479.
- Long-distance buses leave when they are full, so being next door helps. Wikivoyage’s advice is to get to the bus station early.
Good to know
The building also held Moonlite Casino, which the press reported in 2018 was trying to move out, first to the new CBD and then to Airport Junction. The hotel’s own site makes no mention of a casino now, so do not count on one.
Last updated 12 October 2026. Sources: Gaborone Hotel, Sunday Standard, Moonlite Casino at Gaborone Hotel (December 2018), Wikivoyage, Gaborone.
The bus rank casino that spent five years trying to leave
At half past five on the afternoon of 31 March 2016, the Casino Control Board sent its answer to Moonlite, the casino inside the Gaborone Hotel. The board had hours left to live, because the Casino Act was being repealed the next day and a new Gambling Authority was taking over. It could not reach a conclusive decision, it said, on whether Moonlite might move to the i-Towers in the new business district. A High Court judge later remarked that the timing left Moonlite no chance to fix anything first.
Three years waiting, then two courts
Moonlite had asked to move on 2 April 2013. Its director, Bipin Awasthi, also manages the hotel. Three Partners Resorts, which wanted a casino of its own at nearby Masa Square, opposed the move. The man chairing the board’s meeting on 23 March 2016, Thabiso Tafila, was a senior partner in the law firm acting for that rival. He said so, said the meeting had no quorum without him, and both sides let him stay. The Court of Appeal later saw nothing improper in that.
What the board wanted was an approved environmental impact assessment for the whole building. Moonlite thought it meant only the casino floor. From July 2016 it was paying rent on space at i-Towers it had no licence to use. The minister, Vincent Seretse, sent its appeal back to the regulator, which Justice Zein Kebonang, in a ruling reported in March 2017, called “irrational” and illegal. He ordered the licence transferred at once and wondered aloud whether the board’s minutes had been “reconstructed”.
It did not last. Early in 2018 three Court of Appeal judges, with Isaac Lesetedi writing, held that the board had never refused anything. It had simply not finished, so there was nothing to appeal. In December that year Moonlite tried again, for Airport Junction this time.
The ground outside the door
The hotel’s other quarrel is nearer home. During the 2020 lockdown it fenced a strip beside the bus station where hawkers had traded for years. Mpho Matoteng of the Botswana Informal Sector Association told the Botswana Gazette the ministry had given the hotel two metres and it had taken the lot. Awasthi’s answer was that the land had been lawfully allocated to the hotel for parking some six years before. The paper could not get an answer from the city council or the lands ministry. By the association’s own account, hawkers pulled the fence down on 22 and 23 May, some were arrested, and a settlement days later dropped the cases and gave the traders three more months.
What happens under the windows
The Sunday Standard’s 2010 picture of the rank still explains the noise. Conductors turn up at about half past five to start calling passengers, the first buses go around six, and trade peaks in the evening. Money changers did well out of Zimbabweans and Zambians heading home, and out of those who needed pula to pay for a room at the Gaborone Hotel. Others sold tomatoes, cabbages and pirated discs.
A column in the same paper that year put the load on the footbridge between the rank and the Shoprite mall at more than 60,000 people a day, far more than it was built for, many of them commuters from Molepolole, Mochudi, Kanye and Lobatse. A local blogger, writing after Rail Park Mall went up at the rank, found no signs to tell one bus from another, no public toilets apart from the mall’s, and little light after dark.
Since 2017 Phuti Babotlhale has run the Parcel Counter from a container at the rank, a left luggage desk that also charges phones, at first off solar panels.
