Dubai Radisson Blue, Media City
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
The Background: No one ever listens to me. When my colleagues and I were booking our trip to Dubai, I was in charge of airline tickets and someone else was in charge of hotel arrangements. I said, “Don’t book us in a hotel by Dubai Marina. We want to be south of the Burj Khalifa or otherwise, we’ll spend all our time in taxis.”
You can guess where this is going.
Where did he book us? Media City, which is about a five minute taxi ride from Dubai Marina and a 20 to 30 minute ride to the Dubai International Finance Centre, where most of our meetings took place. So we spent all our time in taxis. (That being said, we got a really good rate at the Dubai Radisson Media City…something like $225 a night. Much cheaper than most of the other business class hotels I had looked at.)
Sigh.
Anyhow, in the end, it didn’t really matter because this was quite a nice hotel. My flight got in around 6:30 a.m. and I was to my hotel at 8:30 a.m. I was in bed by 8:40 a.m. with this idea that I would wake up at noon and go shopping or spa-ing. (Spa-ing. Have I just created a new gerund?)
Again. You can guess where this is going. I woke up at 2:30 pm. Talk about a waste of a day!
I liked the desk at the hotel. It was a nice place to work, and I appreciated the coffee/tea service and the two bottles of complimentary water they left for me every night. (They also left chocolate on my pillow each night too!)
I also liked the slippers. So enamored am I with hotel slippers that I’ve started buying my own on Amazon. I hate it when hotels don’t provide slippers. Manky carpet and all that.
I would have liked a bathtub, but I was generally okay otherwise with the bathroom. Nice bath products. (No name brands, but still nice.)
Best though was the spa at the Radisson, where my 1 hr 15 minute facial–by my first male therapist no less–turned into a two hour facial and my skin emerged more youthful than it’s been in years. I was very very pleased.
I never got a chance to try the fitness center, unfortunately. But I did visit the bar on the ground floor and the rooftop bar (not that either have anything to do with fitness). They were both nice in that they didn’t feel like hotel bars; they felt more like destinations. Also, I had a good meal in the hotel restaurant–Certo–where our service was amazingly lovely, although our mains fell short of the mark.
The Verdict: If you need to be in this part of town, you could do far worse than the Dubai Radisson Media City. It’s got all the amenities a business traveler could need, and the service is quite good. In short, this hotel is a very good option.
