Elite Traveler Summer 2022

EXPLORE NEWHOTELS

Top and below Ra ffl es The Palm Dubai is on the Palm Jumeirah’s West Crescent; the hotel’s ornate lobby

Dubai, an attempt to create a hotel experience combining luxury with both elegance and restraint. STAY Ra ffl es The Palm Dubai, a 389-room, 25-acre beachfront resort on the Palm Jumeirah’s West Crescent, was o ffi cially opened in October 2021. When you fi rst enter the hotel you feel as if you’re entering some kind of neoclassical palace, perhaps in pre-revolutionary France: There are marble pillars, glistening Swarovski crystal chandeliers (more than 6,000 of them throughout the hotel), ornately carved ceilings covered with 24-karat gold leaf and chamber musicians at play. But the atmosphere is not hushed or haughty. Rather, it is attractively open, and children of all ages are welcome. We visited the hotel with our 12-year-old son in February 2022, during the UK’s half-term holiday, and it was busy. Later in our stay a wedding party arrived from India, block-booking 89 rooms, and the hotel reached 100% occupancy for the fi rst time. And yet, the atmosphere remained calm and unhurried, the sta ff as courteous as ever. I asked to see one of the one-room suites but, because the hotel was so full, I had to wait until our fi nal morning before I was taken to room 101, no less. Room 101 turned out to be less an Orwellian chamber of

Ra ffl es The Palm Dubai DUBAI

When I fi rst began visiting the UAE in the early 2000s, I ostensibly went to play golf in the winter sunshine. But what really attracted me was the scale of the place, the frenzy of construction and the limitless ambition. Back then, before the fi nancial crisis put the brakes on the most outlandish desires, Dubai, ruled by the Al Maktoum family, embarked on one of the gaudiest and most extravagant spending sprees in modern history as it raced to become a global megalopolis and communications hub in the desert of the eastern Arabian Peninsula. Today, after repeated lockdowns and more than two years of the pandemic, something of the old spirit of adventure has returned (along with the tourists). Before the pandemic, Dubai had begun to lose some of its luster and perhaps some of its attraction for the discerning traveler. Opulence and ostentatious consumerism can only take you so far, and many visitors want more than sunshine and skyscrapers — hence the recent opening of Ra ffl es The Palm

Photos Niall Clutton, Nicolas Dumont