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Published: October 15th 2016
Today we are travelling from London Gatwick to Dubai International (DXB) , United Arab Emirates aka UAE. The flight time was six hours and forty five minutes. We took off from London Gatwick in the day light and landed in evening darkness in Dubai.
The UAE is three (3) hours ahead of UK and Tenerife time. The local currency is the United Arab Emirate Dirham aka AED. One Dirham is about £0.20 pence so around five Dirhams to the £1.00. The exchange rate has again been negatively impacted since Brexit.
We have waited a whole year before we can once again travel on the excellent A380 Emirates double-decker plane. We had seats on the lower deck about halfway down the plane over the offside wing of this beast.
When George stayed at the Premier Inn at Gatwick in December last year whilst they we scattering his mother’s ashes, he had to use the Good Night Sleep guarantee and got one night fully refunded. Unfortunately, they refunded it to someone else’s credit card. They were very quick at correcting it once we had contacted them. They have offered us a free breakfast each for this morning as compensation for
the error. This is a really great way to start off a travelling day, even if we have had to get up a little earlier than planned. The breakfast menu has recently been greatly enlarged and enhanced. It ticked all the boxes.
We have again purchased The Entertainer book of vouchers for Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and this year we know better how to get good value from them. The Entertainer book offers many discount vouchers for all manner of items / products using the concept of buy one get one free deals at selected / specified outlets. It mainly covers meals and select hotel rooms. We had the books delivered to home so we have had plenty of time to digest what is in them and pack them so they work efficiently for us.
We have packed all the vouchers for both Dubai and Abu Dhabi that we will not use into plastic bags and today we gave them to one of the lucky Emirates flight attendants. She seemed very surprised that someone would do this, but said she would share them amongst the other crew members. We did this last year and once again, we were
looked after very well on board with extra hospitality. We are glad that they will be used rather than throwing them away.
Today we fly with Emirates Airlines again to Dubai. We enjoyed our trip on the A380 plane with them last year, and this year was just as good. Our flight saw us at around 41,000 feet and around 578 miles per hour for the duration. It was a pretty smooth flight with only two short areas of turbulence. The food on board was very varied and good quality. This was more than enough for us for our time on board. This included a substantial lunch and a lavish petite afternoon tea menu.
We landed at about 7.45pm Dubai time. It was somewhat of a hard landing though it evened out very quickly.
Last year we hired a car to get us from the airport to the hotel. Being tired after the long flight this was not a good thing to do. So this year we just jumped straight into a local taxi.
In Dubai, all taxis are cream in colour with different coloured roofs depending on the company that runs them and the type
Dubai pink taxi
Driven by ladies for ladiesof passengers they are permitted to carry. In addition to this, they also have ones with pink roofs that are driven by ladies for ladies. Tonight, we were directed to travel in one of the pink roofed taxis, as most of the travellers were men and there were loads of pink roofed taxis not being used.
Tonight we have booked into the four stars rated Radisson Blu in Dubai´s Media City. We stayed here for three nights during our trip last year and had problems with the noise from the disco. They compensated us very well at the time, but then offered us a free Business Class upgrade if we would return again – How could we refuse. We have calculated that this upgrade would have cost us about 1000 AED for the four nights we are here. This is about £ 200.
For the Radisson Blu, we are using one of the Entertainer Travel Book vouchers. This gives us the second night free and then 20% reduction on the third and fourth nights. If we had booked this hotel using our normal booking search engine, the four nights would have cost us an additional 462 AED. This
is about £100.
We seemed to have been eating all day, but only snack bites. So we decided to try out the Icon Bar where we also ate last year. We used an entertainer voucher here so only paid for one meal, but as it is in the Hotel, this still works out a bit expensive. Yummy food though. We eventually got to bed just gone 11.00PM.
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Kath
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Ulgrade
You did really wel, there shows it pays to be assertive