Romantic Dubai: 5 days, two hotels and two dinners worth planning around
Dubai sells romance badly. The version in the brochures is a private table on a beach with a photographer, and it is expensive, staged and slightly grim. The version that works is simpler: two rooms that are genuinely good, one night in the desert away from everything, food that is worth going out f
- Duration
- 5 days
- Pace
- Slow
- Hotel changes
- 2
- Best months
- Nov, Dec, Jan, Feb, Mar
- From
- $2,600 per person
This is a five-day trip with three moving parts and a lot of empty space. That is deliberate.
Who it suits: honeymoons, anniversaries, a short winter escape for two, and anyone adding a few days for two people at the end of a longer trip.
Day by day
Day 1: Arrive, and stay put. Met at the airport and driven to a beach hotel on Jumeirah or the Palm. Nothing scheduled beyond dinner. We book somewhere that is a fifteen-minute drive from the hotel rather than in it, because hotel restaurants in Dubai are competent and interchangeable and the city’s best food is not in them.
Day 2: The old city in the morning, water in the afternoon. Out early to Al Fahidi and the creek, with a guide for ninety minutes, then the abra across to Deira and the spice souk on foot. Back to the hotel before the heat. The afternoon is the sea and the pool. In the evening, a small private boat on the creek at sunset for an hour, which costs a fraction of the large dinner cruises and is better in every way.
Day 3: Desert. Collected mid-afternoon and driven ninety minutes out to a small camp in a conservation reserve. Six to twelve guests, not sixty. A walk on the dunes at sunset, dinner outside, and a private tent with the sides open. This is the night people remember, and it is the reason we build the trip around a hotel change rather than staying in the city for five nights.
Day 4: Desert breakfast, back to the coast. Sunrise is the best hour in the desert and it is worth the alarm. A slow morning, then back to a second hotel, deliberately different in character from the first: a small design property in the city, or a quieter beach hotel on Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi if you want to add the drive. Evening free, with one restaurant booked, which for most couples is either a serious Levantine kitchen or one of the Iranian places in Bur Dubai that residents use and visitors do not find.
Day 5: Slow morning, fly home. The room held until the afternoon where the flight allows it. If your flight is late and you want something, the art galleries at Alserkal Avenue fill two hours very well.
What is included
Four nights across two hotels chosen for the room rather than the brand, one of them a private desert camp, all transfers and a private car with driver, an English-speaking guide for the old Dubai morning, the private sunset boat on the creek, two restaurant bookings across two different food cultures, and a WhatsApp group with your consultant here and our partners in Dubai.
What we do not do
We do not book the beach dinner with the photographer, and we will explain why if you ask.
We do not fill the days. Five days for two in Dubai with four scheduled activities is not a holiday, it is an agenda. Two of the five days here have nothing in them beyond a restaurant.
We do not put both hotels in the same district. The point of two hotels is that they are different.
Honest notes
The desert night is the strongest thing in this itinerary and it is weather dependent in one direction only: in December and January it gets down to around 60F (15C) and sometimes lower after dark, and the tents are open. Bring something warm. Nobody expects this and everybody is glad of the warning.
Between June and September we would not build this trip. The desert is unbearable at night, the sea is too warm to be refreshing, and the evenings outdoors that make it work do not exist.
If you have seven days rather than five, Oman is the stronger honeymoon. Muscat, the mountains at Jebel Akhdar and a night in the Wahiba Sands is a better week for two than anything the UAE can put together, and it costs less. We will build either, and we will tell you that.
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