Hyatt Regency Dubai and Galleri, Dubai

I am a person with strong opinions but I very rarely get angry. So if I tell you that no hotel has ever made me more furious than the Hyatt Regency in Dubai, (including the place in India that threatened to call the police when their credit card machine broke down) you can be sure that I'm not one of those precious types who wants kick up a fuss and change rooms because there's a hair on the bathroom floor or I don't like the colour of the curtains. This hotel made a number of massive mess-ups that went beyond what I can forgive as a business traveller and it's hard to make excuses for how badly they behaved.

I stayed at the Hyatt Regency in Dubai about 5 years ago and I went with several colleagues to meet a bunch of Middle Eastern agents with whom we were launching a range of new products. We'd booked half a dozen rooms plus a ground floor meeting room. We also hosted several quite lavish meals with the various agents over a period of 2 full days so we gave the hotel plenty of opportunities to impress us. Sadly most of the time they failed.

How Many Times Can You Let the Same Room?

The first annoyance was being told that we had to pay a full extra night's fees for an early check in. Since we arrived at 7.30am well after many people had already checked out, this seemed very mean. A friend of mine who works for Etihad Airways explained that the hotel can take advantage of flights leaving Dubai late at night by charging for a second night if you want to check out after 4 pm. Potentially they can then let the same room to someone who'll leave for an early morning flight and then catch early arrivers like us for a triple sale of the same room within 24 hours.

The check in itself took so long that I didn't get to my room until 7.50. With an overnight flight behind me I just wanted to sleep and have a shower before our meetings started at noon. No sooner did I get into bed than the most awful noise started. Builders were drilling in the rooms on the floor directly above me. It was absolutely impossible to sleep. My full night's fees had bought me just 10 minutes of peace before the builders started.

I wasn't happy. This drilling, banging and hammering kept on all day. Even downstairs in our meeting room we could still hear the noise. No hotel should pretend to maintain 'business as usual' when it's so noisy that you can't think. You'll not be surprised to hear that I complained - a LOT!

Hosting Business Clients

Dubai is a popular place for meetings like the ones we were holding. As the playground of the Middle East, most of our agents were quite happy to come and spend some time in the city. The Saudi Arabian agent even brought his 'temporary wife' along - I'm not joking, temporary marriage is a cover for up-market prostitution.

The meeting room at the hotel was OK, well equipped, nicely furnished and supplied with plenty of hot and cold drinks but characteristically expensive. At one point we were waiting half an hour for some of our visitors to arrive only to discover they were sitting in the lobby in the mistaken belief that the receptionist had let us know that they were waiting. For the rest of the day we were late with every following meeting because the receptionist was too lazy to tell us that our guests had arrived.

Food and Drink

We ate in several of the restaurants over the time we were there. I quite enjoyed the revolving restaurant at the top of the hotel where we had a buffet lunch each day although you do get a weird sense of very slow whiplash and vertigo. We also tried the Japanese restaurant which served excellent sushi at fairly acceptable prices. The cocktail bar had a Danish waiter who made the best margaritas I've had outside Mexico and that was probably my favourite part of the hotel since the windows looked out over the sea. I have no recollection of any breakfasts which makes me think I probably opted for sleep ahead of food first thing in the morning.

After going out for dinner at another hotel one evening we returned and my colleagues wanted to carry on drinking. I headed off to my room, anxious to get as many hours of drilling-free sleep as possible whilst 'the boys' headed off to the nightclub. Apparently the local ladies were very friendly and the next morning at breakfast my boss was laughing about how strange it was to spend an evening in a dodgy hotel surrounded by prostitutes. It wasn't quite so funny the next day when we checked out and he found an extra charge on his room bill for having a 'guest' in his room. When he asked for an explanation he was told that he'd been in the nightclub so they'd added this charge to cover the lady he'd taken to his room. It would have been embarrassing if it was true but was outrageous because it wasn't. He kicked up a fuss and made them take the charge off.

We rang an Indian colleague who'd checked out early and sure enough, he'd been charged too but hadn't noticed. From the car going to the airport I called the other colleagues to warn them and sure enough they were charged too. My very-Christian Sri Lankan colleague was almost in tears at the insult of the hotel's attempt to not only accuse him of adultery but to charge him for it too. My other colleague who was close to retirement age found it quite flattering that the hotel thought he was 'such a lad' but also insisted on the charge being removed. Of the six of us, I was the only one not charged in this way.

Fight for the Right......to sleep

On the first evening in the hotel I argued with reception about the early check in charge, explaining that I'd been forced to pay for 10 minutes in my room before the drilling started. I had to speak to three or four staff before they grudgingly agreed not to charge me. On the basis of the noise, the clients left abandoned in the lobby, the prostitutes and pimping charges, I really can't recommend this hotel. It has a nice location overlooking the creek, it's linked to a shopping arcade and that even has an ice-rink, but no amount of bragging that you went skating in Dubai will make up for being treated like morons and adulterers by a so-called 5-star hotel.