Al Barsha
COST: $$$
Set in the heart of so-called New Dubai (about 20 minutes south from downtown), this 393-room hotel looks right onto one of Dubai’s most extravagant new attractions: Ski Dubai—the world’s biggest indoor snow park. In fact, hotel guests can access Ski Dubai—and the swanky shops in the adjacent Mall of the Emirates—right from the Kempinski’s soaring alpine-themed lobby. It’s a surreal (but very real) draw. While the common spaces are flights of fancy, though, the rooms and suites are firmly grounded: all are warmly lit refuges with polished wood floors; high, recessed-lit ceilings; streamlined modern furniture; and spacious marble baths with bidets, separate tubs and showers, and double vanities. The hotel has three main restaurants, but the most wildly popular is the gargantuan (935-seat) Sezzam, with a menu that’s organized by cooking method—e.g., flame, bake, steam—rather than cuisine.
Tip: Escape the mall on the rooftop, where the open-air Mosaic Bar extends into the overflowing swimming pool and overlooks the Jumeirah skyline.
Room to Book: One of the 15 “ski chalets,” with their beamed wood ceilings and European chalet décor. One-bedroom chalets look out over Ski Dubai’s indoor slopes, but two-and three-bedroom suites have both slope-side and city skyline views.
As Featured In...
From Travel + Leisure, Sep 2006
“In Dubai, for a couple million dollars, you can own a house on the frond of a palm tree. You can buy France, all of it, and then live there, alone if you like. In this small city in a tiny emirate on a spit of land that spikes out into the Persian Gulf, there are 10 supersized shopping malls and others still under construction, each larger and more grandiose than the next: one roughly duplicates the Taj Mahal and...” MORE>>
From Travel + Leisure, Jun 2006
“You'll find the requisite sumptuously appointed rooms (all with flat-screen TV's, multimedia players, and ultra-plush robes), a lengthy menu of spa treatments, and an ayurvedic wellness center. And then there are the 15 ski chalets, to house the guests who come to schuss down those pistes....” MORE>>
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