The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Join the millions who are giving the love-it-or-hate-it emirate a chance
Dubai’s relative lack of entry restrictions is drawing first-time visitors – and John O’Ceallaigh is among the converts
The world may be in disarray, but you wouldn’t know it at Dubai’s Drift. “Business is booming,” says the beach club’s manager, Ben, a longterm Dubai resident originally from York. “Because Dubai opened its borders to tourists before most of the world, we’ve had so many first-time visitors since the pandemic began who came because they had difficulty getting into Spain or Italy or wherever.
“They had a very antiquated view of Dubai and wondered if they were even able to drink alcohol. But then they discovered they loved the place. I hear all the time about people visiting as tourists who then relocate and move their businesses over here.”
Alcohol is definitely on the menu at Drift. Bordering a long strip of sand on the cusp of the artificial Palm islands, the venue overlooks a profusion of recently erected skyscrapers and the newly inaugurated Ain Dubai, which, at 820ft, is the highest observation wheel in the world. By the pool, guests sip Ruinart champagne and cocktails. Entry to the club costs £42 on weekdays and £52 at weekends, but groups of 10 can hire a more secluded premium cabana with its own pool for £1,250 or £1,900 respectively. Ben tells me it is occupied five or six days a week.
Dubai certainly has its detractors – the most vocal of whom have often never been – but the emirate’s decision to impose few entry restrictions during the pandemic means that its hospitality sector, centred on its eponymous capital city, has enjoyed relative success.
After an initial ban on inbound tourism, Dubai reopened to holidaymakers in July 2020 and has remained accessible ever since. Testing has been scrapped for vaccinated sunseekers and the unvaccinated are still welcome, as long as they take a test. Children under the age of 16 are exempt from all testing requirements – a boon for families.
There was no escaping Dubai’s popularity back in the winter of 2020, when vainglorious influencers flocked there only to be berated for posting snaps while their followers hunkered down in more restricted settings. Their antics provided a talking point and did much to perpetuate the emirate’s reputation for superficiality, yet they represented just a tiny fraction of the holidaymakers who went there during the pandemic.
More than seven million overnight visitors arrived in 2021, booking a total of 31.5million nights in the capital’s hotels. While that isn’t yet a return to 2019 levels, guests are tending to stay longer and occupancy rates over the key winter season have been high.
Ultimately, tourism chiefs hope Dubai will become the world’s most visited city – and its attitude during the Covid crisis has only helped with that goal. According to analytics firm STR, demand for hotels in Dubai during 2021 surpassed that of London and Paris combined, while the total number of rooms sold last year was around one per cent of the global total.
I am reminded of the vital contribution tourism makes to the global economy when I check in at ME Dubai. The hotel is the flagship tenant in a landmark skyscraper shaped like a melting ice cube, the last project by the late architect Zaha Hadid, who also designed the interior. Inside, terraces curl in undulating ribbons around a brilliantly white atrium. In the lobby, a McLaren supercar forms the centrepiece of a glitzy exhibition by the British artist Nat Bowen; in an adjacent boutique, a pair of her customised Nike trainers costs £1,250 – or you could pick up a customised Louis Vuitton bag for £4,700.
It is the kind of excess for which Dubai is notorious, but Alona, the 28-year-old ME Dubai receptionist who shows me to my room, is very grateful she works here, explaining how she spontaneously decided to move to the city from her native Ukraine last year.
“That last-minute decision saved me,” she says. “Currently Ukraine doesn’t need tourists, it needs soldiers. But I’m happy to be in Dubai now: here it doesn’t feel like there are any differences between us because we are all from somewhere different; the city is more open-minded and more social than people might think.”
I have a similar conversation that night with a waiter, also from Ukraine, at the hotel’s open-air Deseo restaurant. With a DJ playing on the terrace, the clubby Latin American eatery is packed with tourists (many of them British) tucking into ceviche and wagyu steak. Though the property got off to a slow start, welcoming diners briefly in winter 2020 before closing again, it has done a roaring trade since opening properly last autumn. Occupancy since then has hovered at 70 to 90 per cent per night.
In total, 44 new hotels came to Dubai last year, bringing the total number to 755 by the start of 2022, but none is more famous than the Burj Al Arab. Unveiled in 1999, the sail-shaped property on its own man-made private island is one of the world’s most exclusive (and expensive) addresses. Lowseason summer rates here start at £1,140 per night, but this winter the hotel launched £52 tours to give ordinary folk the chance to step inside. About 500 sign up each day to gawp at the lobby, with its 590ft-high ceiling, and amble around the vividly coloured Royal Suite, with a revolving bed, a leopard-print carpet, an antique cabinet once owned by Napoleon – and an average nightly rate of £19,000.
Travellers visiting Dubai for the first time since the pandemic will find that plenty of other audacious attractions await. The Dubai Expo, which began in October and ended earlier this week, welcomed more than 20million visitors to a site larger than 600 football pitches, featuring architect-designed pavilions representing 192 countries and 10 organisations. While much of its infrastructure will now disappear, some will remain in place as the site is redeveloped into a new urban district.
The largest pavilion – representing the United Arab Emirates and designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava – resembles a falcon’s wings and includes a domed cinema with seating that rises as a film plays. The secondlargest belongs to Saudi Arabia and features internal waterfalls and replicas of national landmarks. Poignantly, the Ukraine pavilion has been adapted and now staff members hand out coloured Post-it notes so visitors can write messages of support. The walls are plastered in heartfelt jottings.
Dubai’s other notable new attraction is the Museum of the Future. Opened in February – on 22/2/22 – it is an exceptionally beautiful building, its oval-shaped, stainless steel facade covered in Arabic calligraphy. However, its contents are less exciting. Entry costs £30 and exhibitions spread across its many levels supposedly challenge visitors to consider what humanity’s future will look like and the ways in which we can collectively strive to make the world a better place. They are laudable, but with a few exceptions the displays and installations turn out to be just a series of Instagram-friendly moments that are otherwise flimsy, vague and forgettable. It is style over substance – the very thing many detractors say about Dubai.
Discussing the museum with a longterm Dubai resident, her response is revealing: “That fits in with a lot of Dubai and how people think about it, but this city has so much going for it. When I lived in London I found life very difficult, but here you become spoilt. Everything is within 30 minutes and it’s such an easy way of life; and tax-free, too. On a Sunday I’ll go with friends to a beach club where we’ll spend the day sipping fresh coconuts by the pool. What other people do on a five-star holiday is just an average weekend for us.”
She is not alone in seeing the appeal of that. More than 120,000 Britons currently live in Dubai and access to the city has become easier in recent weeks, with mandates on wearing masks outdoors dropped (while they are required indoors, compliance is variable and rarely enforced in any of the hotels I visit), testing for vaccinated travellers no longer needed for entry to the country, and proof of vaccination status discontinued for those exploring the city’s attractions.
Persuaded? If you dislike constant heat and inescapable air conditioning, then Dubai is probably best avoided. However, as millions of people have discovered during the past two years, there are other distractions for those willing to dig below the surface.
The city’s emerging art district on Alserkal Avenue, where about 40 warehouses have been converted into a cluster of galleries and cafés, is one; the Dubai Opera, which opened in 2016, is another. At the other extreme, Al Bastakiya – the oldest district in the city – dates from the 1890s.
As for the quotes etched on the exterior of the Museum of the Future, one key passage translates as follows: “The future belongs to those who can imagine it, design it, and execute it. It isn’t something you await, but rather create.” Though plenty of people will continue to deride Dubai’s approach over the decades to come, there is no doubt that this is a mantra the city has taken very much to heart.