When You Just Presume And You Are Wrong

This weekend I have been looking at booking a hotel in Dubai for an upcoming trip in two weeks time and I have been pleasantly surprised in a good way. When you think of Dubai what comes to mind is flashy cars, oil and wealth so in your mind you would naturally expect things like hotels will be expensive. I was expecting to be paying a bomb for the 3 days because who would have thought the hotels in Dubai are the cheapest I have come across . London I would expect to pay $230-250 per night and they are not the luxury ones either.

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Dubai Waterfront hotel for $200 3 nights + breakfast is not what I was expecting to pay.

When looking through the various hotel booking sites the prices are actually very reasonable to the point of calling them cheap. The prices are in Dirhams which is the currency in the United Arab Emirates and you divide by roughly 3.7 for the USD rate. A cheap hotel for 3 nights is $162 and an expensive one is around $450 so I have found one for $200 ($66 per night) that looks amazing. This includes breakfast and various shuttles they offer to and from the airport plus to other areas around the city.

The crazy thing is my not so luxury hotel in Reading, UK is where I will be staying after Dubai is more expensive which you would not think is possible. Sometimes you perceive things in advance only to find out it is quite the opposite and this is the case here. It just makes no senses that some bog standard hotel can be more expensive than some swanky new modern hotel with all the amenities on hand.

About 12 years ago I took my family to the States for a month long holiday and one of the cities we visited was New York. When booking the hotel it was more about budget as it was 3 rooms each time so I chose the flashiest looking one in my budget range. Nothing was cheap even if you were on the outskirts of the city because if our exchange rate being 10 to 1 and is now 18 to 1.

We were only there for 3 days and the hotel was definitely not what was pictured in the online brochure. One of those places you book once never to return again and you just know none of the customers are repeat customers. I guess there is so many people travelling to New York in that hotel budget range they do not need repeat customers and will always be booked out.

I think the difference between Dubai and many other cities is the amount of hotel rooms they have being more than 150 000 so the competition is strong. Many hotels are similarly priced as that is the ceiling rate they can charge to guarantee occupancy.

The United Arab emirates was known for it's oil and with that running out had to reinvent themselves. I can recall over the years they have marketed themselves as a shopping hub then a holiday destination and now banking plus crypto and AI. Having the hotels and enough hotel rooms allows them to market the country targeting whatever they think can help boost the economy.

Posted Using INLEO