ARABIAN TRAVEL MARKET 2012

Last week the World Trade Centre hosted the Arabian Travel Market, a great first stop when planning your holiday, be it close to home here in Dubai or further afield. It’s like going to a global tourist office with all the extra bits you may need to organize your holiday thrown in. Here are some snippets that you should know about. Emirates is starting to fly to Vietnam from the 4th of June, there will be one flight a day to Ho Chi Minh City leaving at around 9 am. It takes 7 hours 20 minutes and arrives at about 7 in the evening. No other Middle Eastern carrier flies direct to Vietnam, you’d need to go via Singapore or Thailand. Emirates are organizing holiday packages as we speak but they are not in their 2011/12 brochure.

A gorgeous hotel in Danang (one hour flight away from Ho Chi Minh) is the Nam Hai, contact The Travel Collection (with a branch in Dubai) for more information on how to book that. They have some offers on at the moment.

 The Ritz Carlton is opening an amazing new property set on 45 acres with a private beach in Abu Dhabi. It has a giant 1600 square metre outdoor pool so room for everyone to have a proper swim.   They have also taken over (for about  a year now) the Al Bustan hotel in Muscat, 2 easy destinations nearer to home.

You may have heard of the Missoni hotel in Kuwait, but this is the 2nd Missoni hotel in the world, did you know the first one is in Edinburgh in Scotland ! I also hadn’t realized that this hotel was managed by the Rezidor hotel group who also manage the Radisson hotels.   I spoke at length to the Rezidor Group who explained to me what the Missoni family from Italy were trying to depict with their Missoni hotels, uber design for one thing ! We’ll be trying out a couple of the much talked about new Asian restaurants in the newish Radisson hotel on the Sheikh Zayed Road and will of course let our readers know the results.

And finally Dubai Events and Promotions department are launching a new What’s On Calendar called dubaicalendar.com with all Dubai’s main events on one website.

A travel note: www.DoinDubai.com regularly contributes Dubai happenings to Haute Compass a luxury travel site based in Sweden and will be writing for Columbus, an International Travel Magazine based in the Netherlands.

If you haven’t booked your holidays yet hopefully this post has given you some food for thought and keep reading for reviews of some of the places we’ve mentioned above, finally do like and share the post on Facebook, thanks and stay cool in the heat ….Monica