Dubai Travel Guide: Best Luxury Hotels & Restaurants

2025-09-14 · By Splendid

In: Travel Guides

Dubai does not arrive gradually. It appears from the aircraft window all at once: a coastline of improbable geometries, towers catching the sun from every angle, the desert pressing in at the edges as if reminding the city of what it came from. The experience on the ground is more considered than the skyline suggests. This is a city that has learned, over the last two decades, how to slow down.

ARRIVING

Emirates First Class is the natural way in. The private suites with closing doors, the bar that feels like a lounge at thirty thousand feet, and on arrival, the airline's First Class terminal, which is less an airport experience than a suggestion that travel could always be this way. For transfers on the ground, Blacklane handles the city with the same discretion.

WHERE TO STAY

Dubai has more hotel beds than almost any city on earth, and a surprising number of them are genuinely excellent. Our short list below covers the properties that hold the most weight right now.

The Lana, Dubai

Dorchester Collection's first Dubai opening, which debuted early in 2024, immediately reset the city's definition of contemporary luxury. Set on the waterfront in Business Bay, the building is by Foster + Partners, a pale tapering tower whose discipline feels almost surprising by Dubai standards. Inside, the interiors by Gilles & Boissier lean residential. Quiet marble, warm wood, hand-crafted metalwork, more Parisian than Arabian in feel. Nine restaurants anchor the property, including Riviera by Jean Imbert, a Côte d'Azur terrace on the 30th floor, and High Society on the roof. For travellers who find Dubai's older resorts heavy on spectacle, The Lana is the answer.

Atlantis The Royal

Opened with a private Beyoncé concert in early 2023, Atlantis The Royal is the maximalist counterpart to The Lana, and arguably the most talked-about hotel opening of the decade. The building itself, a vertical stack of shifting cubes at the tip of the Palm, is a feat of engineering. Inside you'll find more than ninety restaurants, pools on multiple levels including the Skyblaze cliff-edge pool suites, and a roster of dining that reads like a greatest-hits album: Nobu by the Beach, Milos, Ossiano (the underwater room, where you dine alongside 65,000 marine animals), and Gastronomy by Heston Blumenthal. It is not subtle, and it was never trying to be.

One&Only The Palm

One&Only The Palm is the grown-up counter to Atlantis. Smaller, quieter, more interested in the view than in shouting about it. Set on a private stretch of beach at the western tip of the Palm, its Moorish-Andalusian architecture is all arched colonnades, reflecting pools and carved stucco, with a sense of calm that feels miles away from the Dubai most visitors know. STAY by Yannick Alléno on the waterfront holds three Michelin stars, and the Guerlain Spa is one of the city's quietest rooms. If you come to Dubai and want to feel as though you've left it, stay here.

Bvlgari Resort Dubai

Bvlgari Resort Dubai sits on Jumeirah Bay, a small seahorse-shaped island built expressly to host it, with architecture by Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel that translates Italian coastal elegance into a Gulf setting better than it has any right to. The rooms are residential in scale, the hardware is made in Italy, the marble is Calacatta. Il Ristorante by Niko Romito brings the Michelin-starred chef's refined approach to Italian cuisine, and the 50 metre infinity pool overlooks the Dubai skyline in a way that feels almost cinematic at blue hour. The vibe isn't Dubai trying to be Dubai. It's Italy, grafted gracefully onto the Gulf.

Shangri-La Dubai

Perched on Sheikh Zayed Road with Dubai Mall minutes away and the full spread of the skyline visible from every upper room, the Shangri-La occupies a position that feels both central and removed. The interiors are harmonious in the way that genuinely considered hospitality tends to be: nothing competes, everything supports, the whole effect lands as calm.

The rooms face the city or the water, and both have their argument. By day the view is architectural, a lesson in ambition played out in glass and steel. By evening the towers light up in layers and the effect is something closer to spectacle. The balcony, widely considered the most photographed in the city, earns its reputation at golden hour.

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WHERE TO DINE

Zuma Dubai

Zuma in DIFC remains the city's most consistent power lunch. Rainer Becker's contemporary Japanese izakaya, translated for a Gulf audience without losing any of its edge. The robata grill is the star, but the sashimi counter and the sake list deserve equal attention. Come for lunch, stay through the afternoon, and you'll understand why it has held its reservations-required status for more than a decade.

LPM Dubai

La Petite Maison (LPM) translates the Niçoise original to DIFC with the same blue and yellow palette and the same generosity of butter. The burrata with tomatoes, the warm prawns with olive oil, the whole chicken for two. None of it reinvents the wheel and none of it needs to. It remains the city's most reliable lunch for a long table of friends.

Orfali Bros Bistro

Orfali Bros is the Dubai opening everyone in food is talking about. Three Syrian brothers (Mohammad, Wassim and Omar) in a quiet Jumeirah address, cooking elevated Levantine with contemporary technique. The menu changes constantly and the tasting is the way in. Expect fermented chickpea, charred aubergine, lamb neck that has been reduced for days. It ranked number one in the Middle East & North Africa 50 Best list two years running, and the reservation is nearly impossible. Book a month out.

INA at J1 Beach

INA at J1 Beach is where Chef Glen Ballis does his most confident work: flame-kissed sharing plates served in a retractable-roof pavilion that opens to the Gulf when the evening is right. The cooking is generous and precise in equal measure.

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Sushisamba Dubai

Sushisamba occupies level 51 of the Palm Tower, 230 metres above ground, with 360-degree views and a Nikkei menu that holds its own against the spectacle. Order the yellowtail and stay for the sunset.

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Flamingo Room by Tasha

Perched beside the turtle lagoon at Jumeirah Al Naseem, Flamingo Room brings African glamour to the Dubai dining scene with the kind of confidence that only Tasha Sideris could sustain. The interiors are lush and layered, all botanical prints and warm brass, and the menu draws from across the continent with dishes that are as vivid on the plate as the room is around them. It is a restaurant that photographs beautifully and eats even better.

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WHERE TO SHOP

Cartier at Dubai Mall maintains a flagship with a discreet café hidden behind the salon, worth knowing about for a mid-afternoon pause. O'de Rose is among the city's pioneering concept stores, Collective Africa a glorious homage to the continent. Fashion Avenue and Level Shoes gather the world's marquee labels beneath a mile of marble for those who want everything in one place.

A DAY TRIP TO ABU DHABI

The drive from Dubai to Abu Dhabi is an easy ninety minutes down Sheikh Zayed Road, and the capital rewards the effort. Where Dubai is vertical and hurried, Abu Dhabi is horizontal, calmer, and increasingly the cultural counterweight to its northern neighbour.

Louvre Abu Dhabi

Louvre Abu Dhabi is Jean Nouvel's 2017 masterpiece and one of the most quietly moving museum buildings of the past twenty years. The domed roof, a web of eight thousand interlaced metal stars, casts what Nouvel calls a rain of light onto the plaza below, shifting in geometry minute by minute as the sun moves. The collection spans twelve galleries arranged chronologically across civilisations, and includes a Leonardo, a Magritte, a Whistler, a Van Gogh, alongside pieces from Mesopotamia and the Zhou dynasty. Go at opening, spend three unhurried hours, and return to the dome before closing when the light is at its most particular.

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque

A short drive from the museum, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is one of the largest and most architecturally impressive mosques in the world, and entirely free to visit. White Macedonian marble, inlaid mother-of-pearl floral mosaics, a hand-knotted carpet the size of a football field, and seven Swarovski chandeliers above reflecting pools. Modest dress is required; abayas are available to borrow at the visitor entrance. The golden hour here, when the marble turns pink, is unforgettable.

Emirates Palace

Finish at Emirates Palace, Mandarin Oriental for afternoon tea or a late lunch. The property is Abu Dhabi's grandest hotel, over a kilometre long, with 114 domes and a private beach. The gold-flecked cappuccino is gimmicky but the room itself is not. Return to Dubai for dinner.

The Verdict

Dubai rewards the visitor who approaches it without assumptions. The city that exists on the ground is more nuanced, more hospitable, and more interesting than its reputation suggests. The Shangri-La gives you the best of its skyline and enough quiet to appreciate it. That combination, in a city moving this fast, is worth more than it sounds.