DESTINATIONS DUBAI | MIDDLE EAST & NORTH AFRICA Stay WHERE TO
Jumeirah Beach Hotel The wave-shaped JBH is a slam dunk for a great family holiday. All its 599 sea-facing rooms and suites offer amazing Arabian Gulf views, and all are breezily and beautifully designed, but it’s the location, right on the beach next to Wild Wadi Waterpark, that will sell it to every child in the world (and their grateful parents). Book it: From £207 per room per night.
Burj Al Arab The 200 suites at the famous sail-shaped all-suite hotel are as jaw-dropping as you’d expect, with breathtaking views, opulent chandeliers, gold leaf, Hermes toiletries, airport transfer via Rolls-Royce and, perhaps best of all, access to the stunning 100m-long infinity pool and Terrace, one of the most coolly exclusive seafront spots in the emirate. Book it: From £1,345 per suite per night.
Jumeirah Emirates Towers Perfectly located for the Museum of the Future, this top-notch business hotel features classic design pieces such as Eames armchairs and an elegant, masculine mien across its 400 rooms and suites. Ten rooms on a women-only floor offer yoga mats and a cosmetics fridge, and if you’ve children in tow, it’s the only city hotel in Dubai offering unlimited complimentary access to Wild Wadi Waterpark. Book it: From £118 per room per night.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Jumeirah Beach Hotel; Royal Suite, Burj Al Arab; Expo 2020; the Ain Dubai wheel PICTURE: Dany Eid
The most recognisable of these, the ‘seven-star’ Burj
Al Arab, has recently turned its two royal suites into the centrepiece of the Inside Burj Al Arab tour, which lets visitors unable to afford the £1,345 per night price tag pretend they’re staying in the sail-shaped hotel by snapping pics of its eye-poppingly lavish royal suite. Next door, the Experience Suite offers an engaging series of digital interactives and augmented reality displays that document the genesis and journey of Dubai and its most famous hotel. It comes complete with a virtual feast and a range of green-screen Burj backdrops visitors can pose against for commemorative photos. Oh, and the decks that David Guetta used on his United at Home lockdown gig, live-streamed from the hotel’s helipad during 2021’s lockdown.
FROM SEA TO SAND The carefully considered content and attention to detail that have gone into creating Inside Burj Al Arab (tickets from £80), which has its own shop, reception area and cafe bar, are exactly what you’d expect from the always luscious Jumeirah group. But the hotel’s spearheading of the Dubai Turtle Rehabilitation Project is more unexpected.
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Since the programme’s inception in 2004, some 2,000 injured sea turtles have been rescued and restored to health in the Rehabilitation Lagoon at Jumeirah Al Naseem, which is open daily to visitors. The free weekly feeding session (at 11am on Wednesdays) gives priority to children and is utterly charming. And turtles aren’t the only wildlife being given a helping hand in Dubai. At the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, you can see how the Arabian oryx – once classified as extinct in the wild – is faring under a successful breeding programme, and even if you don’t actually see one of these elegant one-horned white antelopes, the startlingly beautiful landscape is always worth the visit. It’s long been popular with
visitors keen to dine in the desert under the stars, act out Lawrence of Arabia fantasies on a camel ride or tear up and down sand dunes on quad bikes. But many Dubai residents discovered a gentler way of exploring this landscape for themselves during lockdown, when cycling the more than 50 miles of desert tracks became so popular that bike sales soared. Visitors can join in the fun through the mushrooming bike hire companies and tour companies offering day trips.
18 NOVEMBER 2021
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