Three Days in Dubai

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Dave and I took the trip of a lifetime over Thanksgiving. Let’s rewind to March of 2020.. when the world shut down and noone was traveling anywhere. I’m in a travel Facebook group and saw a post about this crazy travel deal for the Maldives for a week in a overwater bungalow for 70% off. Basically, the resort needed money, so you would pay upfront and could use the voucher anytime before 2023, so we went for it! Dubai is a popular stopover for the Maldives because it’s less than a four hour flight. My motto is when you’re traveling that far you may as well see two places, so we did three nights in Dubai on our way to the Maldives. We booked our flights using Delta miles. Dave and I use the Delta Platinum Amex for our joint expenses so we accrue a good amount of miles. This card has a higher annual fee ($250), but you get a free companion pass (basically buy one ticket and a second person flies free) every year, so we can justify the fee. It also gets you a credit for TSA precheck. We used to have the Delta Gold Amex ($99 annual fee) and loved that one too, but feel like the perks are worth the extra $150. You can get 50,000 bonus miles if you sign up for the card here.

Hotels for Three Days in Dubai

We got into Dubai around 11pm and were being picked up for a day in the desert early the next morning, so decided to stay at a cheaper hotel our first night and splurge the other two. We stayed at the Courtyard Marriott Culture Village, which was actually a brand new hotel. It was really nice and super clean, I would have been fine staying there the whole trip. The location wasn’t the most ideal, but not bad. 

We then checked into the JW Marriott Marquis, where we used points for our stay. I have the Marriott Bonvoy Amex card that I use for Lex Eats expenses, so that’s why we stuck to Marriott properties. The JW was really nice, it’s actually the tallest five star hotel in the world! It had a ton of restaurants and a really cool bar on the top floor that looks over the skyline of Dubai. I use the Marriott Bonvoy Amex for my business purchases, which is how we have points. You can earn 75,000 Marriott Bonvoy points for signing up here.

Itinerary for Three Days in Dubai

One of the top items on my Dubai bucket list was to take a trip to the desert. There are a ton of tour groups that will pick you up from your hotel and take you to the desert for different types of excursions. Check out Viator for a lot of options. TBH, most of them looked kind of cheesy to me. I came across the Al Maha Desert Resort and figured out they offer a day trip that is more affordable than staying at the resort (around $1500 a night…) They picked us up at 8am and we had a full day of activities including a delicious breakfast, archery, lounging by the pool, three course lunch, desert drive, and camel ride culminating with champagne in the desert. It was probably my favorite thing we did in Dubai and would highly recommend. I’m a sucker for luxury hotels and it was so cool to experience a property we probably wouldn’t be able to otherwise. If we hadn’t done the Al Maha, we would have done the Platinum Heritage tour.

After the Al Maha drove us back to the JW, we went to the Time Out Market for dinner. It’s a food hall that has a bunch of local vendors. We ate wagyu short rib, falafel and bao buns, which were all so good. I love marketplaces like that when traveling because you can try a bunch of different things. Time Out Market is right by the Dubai Fountain in front of the Burj Kalifa, so we went outside to watch the fountain show, which runs every half hour at night. It was pretty impressive, definitely more so than the Bellagio fountain. There is also a light show on the Burj Kalifa, which is cool to see. Side note: The Burj Kalifa is the tallest building in the world, and it has a observatory floor that is a big tourist attraction. We decided not to go up after reading reviews that it wasn’t necessarily worth it and you have to wait in line for a few hours to get in. We felt like we got a similar experience from the Vault bar at our hotel, so seeing the Burj from outside was good enough for us. After the fountain show we went to the Dubai Mall, which was wild! It’s HUGE and so easy to get lost in. There are all kinds of shops including every luxury store you could think of and a ton of restaurants. There’s an aquarium, ice rink, cinema and more. You could easily spend a whole day there, but an hour or two was enough for us. 

On day two we slept in a bit then headed to the Arabian Teahouse for brunch. It was more traditional middle eastern food and pretty good. TBH, it seemed like it was pretty close to our hotel, which is partly why I chose it, so I wouldn’t make special trip there if it wasn’t close by. We then spent the rest of the day at the souks, or markets in the historic part of Dubai. We started with the Old Souk (also called Textile Souk), then took a water taxi across the creek to the spice and gold souks. You just pay one diera (less than a dollar) when you get on the boat and it was maybe three minutes across the water. I really enjoyed the souks, but you definitely need to be comfortable saying no and haggling! They will start out really high and you can name your price or walk away and sellers will typically come way down. While we used our credit card at most other places, it’s best to have cash here. Some sellers would take a card and some would take USD, but you got the best deal using local currency. The Old Souk had more traditional clothes, scarves, bags and touristy things. The spice souks had all types of spices and teas. As you walk along to the gold souk there are more tourist shops/stalls that have good souvenirs and gifts. The gold souk has all types of jewelry, including reallllly nice gold, diamonds and fine jewelry. Some of the jewelry shops will haggle and some will not. We were tempted to buy some nice jewelry, but a little intimidated by it and didn’t need to spend the money, ha, but it was fun to browse! That night we had drinks at the Vault bar and dinner at the Thai restaurant at the JW. 

On our third day we got up and went to brunch at Brunch and Cake at the Point, which is on Palm Island, a manmade island shaped like a palm tree. It was cool to see the island, we sat outside with a view of all the resorts and the water. After walking around the Point a bit, we took a cab to the Dubai Marina. We walked along the water and found a boat that would take us on a hour cruise around the harbor for $80. It was really cool to see all the yachts and resorts up close! Plus cruise by the skyscrapers along the marina. From the marina, we followed some poor advice and went to the Global Village. Someone had told us it was really cool, but it turned out to be a cheesy tad bit sketch theme park. We were there for twenty minutes before we left and went to Expo2020, which is like the World’s Fair that just so happened to be in Dubai while we were there. Every country has its own pavilion displaying the best of their country and how they were innovating for the future. Many countries had yummy food at their pavilion too! I would definitely recommend the Expo, but be warned it’s a lot of walking and could easily be an entire day trip. I would research ahead of time what pavilions you want to see and download a map so that you can find them easily. 

Getting Around Dubai

To be honest, Dubai was a bit harder to navigate than I expected. Well, not hard, per se, but everything felt spread out and the roads didn’t quite make sense to me. Something that was half a mile away would require you to get on a highway and uturn in ways that just didn’t make sense. Taxis and Ubers are cheap and easy to find, so it wasn’t that much of a hassle, just not as seamless as I would have hoped. Also try and download the Careem app, which is the local version of Uber. It’s supposedly even cheaper, but I couldn’t get the sms text to make an account with them so couldn’t use it. I didn’t find much of Dubai walkable except around the Dubai Mall/Burj Kalifa. There is a metro system that’s supposedly easy to use, but the routes were always too long to make it worth our time when taxis weren’t that expensive.

There’s our three days in Dubai! While there is a ton to do in Dubai and I definitely could have filled a few more days, I felt like three days was the perfect amount to see what Dubai has to offer. I really wanted to do a half day trip to Abu Dhabi, but you had to have a covid test to get in and I didn’t want to fool with it when we had to take one to go to the Maldives as well. I also really wanted to see the Jumeirah Mosque, but the timing they were open for tourists didn’t work out with our schedule. We didn’t do any beaches in Dubai since we were headed to a week on the beach in the Maldives, but would have done so if not. I read about Jumeira and Kite Beach. I also really wanted to do high tea at the Burj Al Arab (the world’s only seven star hotel), but it was pretty expensive and decided to do our splurge at the Al Maha instead. I have a google map of more recommendations I’d be happy to share if you’re headed to Dubai, just comment below or send me an email! Check out my other travel guides here:

Barcelona Travel Guide

Portugal Travel Guide

Dublin Travel Guide

Budapest Travel Guide

My Trip to Thailand

Bangkok

Bali Honeymoon

Palm Springs Bachelorette

Denver Travel Guide

Biscuits & blessings,

Leels