Larger than life

FROM shopping malls to towers, everything in Dubai is super-size. But its biggest drawcard for long-haul passengers is location.

Dubai mall aquarium

"DUBAI is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling or Elvis," wrote A.A. Gill in a stinging appraisal of the emirate in Vanity Fair in April, in which he detailed the excesses of Dubai and decried what he saw as its abundance of bad taste.

It’s true there’s something Las Vegas-like about Dubai, not least of which is its location in the middle of a desert, but it’s not all bad taste. If anything it’s lack of tawdry showgirls, slot machines and Elvis impersonators makes Dubai a Las Vegas without the tackiness.

For starters Dubai has the world’s first Armani Hotel, where every element right down to the floral arrangements in the guest rooms has been given the Armani touch. It’s 10 floors of beige on beige interior and, as you would expect of something that bears the Armani name, it couldn’t be more tasteful. 

While one hotel doesn’t make a city, the Armani Hotel Dubai is something of an oasis here. In fact, it’s possible to think of the entire Downtown Dubai area, where the hotel is located, as a city in a city. Downtown Dubai, pictured right, is a large-scale, mixed-use complex still, in part, under construction.

As well as being home to the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, it is also where you’ll find the world’s biggest shopping centre, the Dubai Mall, and then there’s the world’s largest dancing fountain, the Dubai Fountain, set on a manmade 12ha lake known as the Burj Khalifa Lake. Downtown Dubai covers an area of 2 sq km and, when complete, it is estimated it will have cost $US20 billion.

While the Burj Khalifa needs no introduction, that luminous green space in the photograph that looks like
a large swimming pool is, in fact, the the Burj Khalifa Lake and the black squiggles in the middle are the jets of the Dubai Fountain. In the bottom right-hand corner of the picture you can see a series of circular roofs around a massive, curve-like structure – that’s just a section of the Dubai Mall.

Of course world’s biggest doesn’t necessarily mean world’s best, or world’s most tasteful. And for some the idea of venturing into the world’s biggest shopping mall is enough to induce an anxiety attack. To be honest, I approached the Dubai Mall with a mixture of dread and low expectations. And if you want to go to the top of the Burj Khalifa, you need to visit the Dubai Mall at least once as the lookout on the 124th floor is accessed from the mall. Confused?

After purchasing your ticket for the lookout, you take a long, moving footway to the base of the Burj Khalifa. The lookout entrance was designed to have minimal impact on the occupants of the Burj Khalifa, not that there are too many of those at the moment as a result of Dubai’s financial woes.

The most surprising thing about a mall this size is how easy it is to navigate. It is designed around a semi-circle that is broken up with a series of atriums that not only let in natural light but also help to orient shoppers as to where they are in the mall. With more than 1200 retail outlets, including branches of Bloomingdale’s and Galeries Lafayette department stores and virtually every luxury fashion store on the planet, there is nothing you can’t buy here. Dubai Mall is also home to an indoor gold souk, an aquarium and an ice rink and – you guessed it – they’re all the world’s biggest (or at least Olympic-sized).

Gill clearly visited Dubai in summer – he mentioned the heat and humidity – and with temperatures consistently in the 40s it’s little wonder he was less than impressed by the place. Dubai is best visited in the northern winter months and is probably not going to be the place for Australians to take an extended holiday, but it is a great place to break up a long trip.

Its location makes it the perfect for a stopover on the way to Europe. It’s 15 hours’ flight time from Sydney to Dubai, for example, and then it’s a relatively short trip to Europe. London is 7 hours 50 minutes away; you can get to Rome in just under seven hours. This proximity is part of the reason that Emirates has been a profitable airline in every year of its operation except one. In fact, Emirates has, in the past, boasted profits greater than those of the US carriers combined, according to Time magazine.

“One thing we don’t have any control over but which works in our favour is the geographical position of Dubai,” says Richard Vaughan, Emirates divisional senior vice president in charge of commercial operations worldwide. “Three-quarters of the world’s population is within eight hours of Dubai. That’s a massive plus for us and we make full use of it. The fastest way to New York out of Perth, for instance, is via Dubai.”

Vaughan, an Australian, says Emirates is growing everywhere and also expanding its routes into Africa.
“We employ 158 different nationalities so we’ve virtually got the world covered when it comes to languages. It’s intentional as we want to create a cosmopolitan culture for the airline to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of Dubai.”

To cater for increased capacity, Dubai has built the world’s largest airport terminal, Terminal 3, exclusively for the use of Emirates. Next year it will open an extension to Terminal 3 just to cater to Emirates expanded fleet of A380s. “We will receive our sixteenth A380 in September and that will be the first of the next 75,” says Vaughan.

Emirates operates 63 flights per week to Dubai from Australia from Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. From October 3, Emirates will have three daily flights direct to Dubai from Sydney with connections to 25 destinations in Europe.