Starstruck
A good hotel is a place to rest your head; A great hotel has the power to transform the travel landscape. For Travel + Leisure's third annual It List, we trekked (literally) across the globe to determine the select properties you'll be going to next. Here, from beach resorts to city hideaways, our editors' picks for the best new hotels of 2008.
The Burj Al Arab: Dubai
Since it opened in 1999, the Burj has come to epitomise the tenacious rise of the Gulf Peninsula, where fishing villages are being transformed into high-rise dream factories.
Imagine that the creative urges of Liberace, Liza Minnelli and Michael Jackson had been unleashed on a 321-metre skyscraper astride its own man-made island. You might end up with DayGlo decoration, myriad gold leaf (more than 1500 square metres, all 24 carat), a torrent of marvellous water features and an entire wall, more than 200 metres high, with no glass, no concrete, just a swath of fibre-woven Teflon that evokes the lateen sails of dhows.
Put that same trio in charge of designing hotel amenities and they might conjure such extravagances as champagne and strawberry baths, a pillow menu for children, rotating four-poster beds, the world's largest fleet of Rolls-Royces and a minimum of 14 phones per suite. All of which exist, often in shimmering technicolour, at Dubai's Burj Al Arab. Such trifling considerations as taste have not hindered the Burj's fortunes. Since it opened in 1999, it has come to epitomise the tenacious rise of the Arabian Peninsula, where humble fishing villages, awash with petro-dollars, are being transformed into high-rise dream factories.
The Burj has become much more than a hotel; it is a destination in its own right, a modern marvel that has captured the imagination of the masses who flock here. It has also aroused the imaginations of the world's top hoteliers, sparking the equivalent of a modern-day gold rush to the Gulf. Leading operators are staking out patches of desert for their castles in the sand, each one promising unprecedented levels of decadence.
As the "Tower of the Arabs" prepares to celebrate its 10th birthday next year, its mantle as the world's most opulent hotel is under siege. Dozens - hundreds - of hotels are about to open or are under construction in Dubai alone, and all intend to be five-star fabulous.
In 2007 the Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) prepared an exhaustive file listing all the major developments underway in the emirate. It documented entire cities set to rise from the desert - like Festival City, Healthcare City, Media City - and extravagant infrastructure investments such as the 75-kilometre Dubai metro service (opening 2009) and Falcon City of Wonders, where tourists can ogle at replicas of the Lighthouse at Alexandria, say, or the Great Wall of China.
By far the biggest presence will be hotel operators. The DTCM's dossier reads like an A-List of accommodation chains - Fairmont, Intercontinental, Armani, Emirates, Four Seasons, Trump, to name a few - seasoned with a triumph of superlatives. Behold "the tallest hotel serviced apartment tower in the world" (Marina 101), "the world's largest hotel" (the 6500-room Asia Asia Hotel, "the largest spa in the Middle East" (Taj Exotica), the world's most exclusive condominiums" (Palazzo Versace).
Dubai is not a city known for its restraint. Hence the visible-from-space Palm Jumeirah development alone will contain more than 30 new hotels. Mega-developments such as the 10-kilometre Bawadi enclave in Dubailand will contribute another 50 to the city's already teeming hospitality scene. And then there's Atlantis, The Palm, part of which will be built under the sea. The submarine view has been transformed into the Lost City of Atlantis, miraculously rediscovered amid an immense aquarium stocked with hundreds of species including sharks and manta rays. When guests tire of gazing out of their three-storey goldfish bowl they can brave the waterslides built into a "Mesopotamian-style" ziggurat or dine on cuisine bearing the celebrity endorsement of superchefs Nobu Matsuhisa, Giorgio Locatelli or Michel Rostang.
However mesmerising the Dubai phenomenon is, it is only part of the story. The entire Gulf region is where oil turns to gold and where gold, in turn, is transfiguring these formerly barren sheikhdoms and kingdoms into a new world empire.
And in this empire, it's the commoners who get to stay in the palaces.
Emirates Palace: Abu Dhabi
The palace is an eight-storey confection of arabesque domes, Swarovski crystal chandeliers, marble and pure gold, that took 20,000 workers three years to complete.
Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi was conceived as a gilded citadel for the Gulf Cooperation Council, an elite regional union comprising their majesties and highnesses from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain.
Enclosed within an 85-hectare seafront compound, the palace is an eight-storey confection of 114 arabesque domes, 1002 Swarovski crystal chandeliers, myriad marble and more than 8,000 kilograms of pure gold, that took 20,000 workers three years to complete. Its owner, the Abu Dhabi Government, declines to reveal how much money was lavished on its construction but speculators put the figure at at least $3 billion. Given the GCC has only two summits a year, that's a lot of money to spend on an empty palace.
So the government called in Europe's oldest luxury accommodation group, Kempinski, and this magnificent edifice was opened to the paying public in March 2005. It was then, and remains now, one of the most expensive hotels ever built. Perhaps even the most expensive.
Every visitor to Abu Dhabi is welcome to come here and marvel. The vast central atrium, its floor inlaid with 13 of the finest marbles and its roof sealed by a 42-metre-wide dome finished in a mosaic of silver and gold glass tiles, attracts a constant stream of tourists. They order coffee in the 300-seat cafe and gasp as it arrives on a silver tray with one perfect date in a patty case and a single chocolate flecked with gold leaf - a taste of the high life for just $9.40, excluding tip. Emirates Palace may seem remarkably democratic and accessible, but there is an inner sanctum here that mere mortals can never enter.
The hotel's fifth and eighth floors remain off-limits to ordinary guests because they are reserved for the exclusive use of the GCC rulers or visiting heads of state (George W Bush slept there during his visit to the Gulf in January). The fifth floor is a dedicated reception area for the rulers' suites, while the eighth and highest floor houses their private domains.
The closest that the average tourist can get to the sumptuousness of the sheiks' quarters is to book a Palace Suite on the sixth or seventh floor. Each of these apartments is served by a private lift and a butler who, in the manner of the Middle East, is used to fulfilling any request at any time of the day.
The most expensive carpets in the world are produced in Iran, and so the carpets here - exquisite, pastel wonders - are, naturally, from Iran. The sinks are forged from pure silver (gold in the rulers' suites), the walls are finished in pressed silk, the cutlery is Christofle and the crockery is hand-painted with gold. Just as you'd expect if you were paying about $17,000 for one night's accommodation including airport transfers by Rolls-Royce and all meals.
For $840 a night, you can bed down in a Coral Grand Room in one of the two wings off the central palace. Coral Grand Rooms have garden views and none of the deluxe trappings of the suites, but the furnishings are tasteful, echoing the muted hues of the emirate's desert sands, and guests are lavished with flowers and fruit and have access to the same facilities (gym, pools, beach) as everyone else. It seems a reasonable price to pay to stay at the most expensive hotel ever built.
Emirates Palace may not yet have usurped the mantle of the Middle East's most opulent from the Burj Al Arab, but when pop prince Justin Timberlake came to the Gulf in December for his one and only concert in the region, he performed in Abu Dhabi, at Emirates Palace. The Burj didn't get a look-in.
|