Review: Atlantis The Royal, Dubai

Have you ever seen those lunatics who fling themselves down a hill in England chasing a wheel of cheese, fully aware they’re hurtling toward potential disaster—all for nothing?  It’s entertaining not just for the absurdity but for the inevitable carnage.  That’s Atlantis The Royal.  I knew I’d hate it before I even arrived.  I hated it when I walked in.  I hate writing about it.  I hate it.  Every tiny thing I didn’t hate was a shocking revelation, and every star they’ve earned in this review was wrestled from me like a wheel of cheese tumbling downhill.  Although a trip to the hospital with a dislocated shoulder sounds like a far better use of my time.

795.  No, that’s not the number of times I considered fleeing to the nearest embassy; it’s how many rooms there are at Atlantis The Royal.  If you think that sounds like a hotel wildly out of place on this blog, then congratulations, you’re already smarter than the judges of World’s 50 Best.  Let’s not forget—this place is supposedly the 9th best hotel in the world.  The fact that Atlantis shares a ranking list with Passalacqua, a 22-room lakeside gem, is an insult to, well, everything.  Everyone should feel offended, regardless of your political views, religious beliefs, or whether you can count to ten without using your fingers.

When you roll up to the hotel, the first thing you’ll see is a Louis Vuitton store.  You’re not entering a luxury hotel, you’re stepping into a shopping mall that happens to have rooms attached.  The thumping music in the lobby, paired with its absurd scale (larger than entire hotels I usually care to stay in), quickly made me realise that coming here has cemented my status as a goddamn hero to my kids.  Papa has really taken one for the team.  Yep, I wanted to stay elsewhere, but apparently, this was the place to come with children.  Little were we aware, though, that the kids’ club comes with the most convoluted set of rules imaginable, leaving them more entertained by trying to decode the regulations than by anything inside.  Just getting them into the kids’ club is an ordeal—lining up at reception, filling out endless paperwork, and enduring a registration process so tedious it feels like applying for citizenship.  Each child requires a separate form, adding another ten painful minutes to the experience.  Did I mention I hate this place?

The rooms are utterly forgettable—generic to the point of being indistinguishable from any mid-tier chain hotel, and certainly not a patch on other properties in Dubai that actually understand luxury, like The Lana, Bulgari, or even the Mandarin Oriental.  There’s a complete lack of imagination in the decor, but with 795 rooms, I suppose there’s only so many lamps one can buy before giving up entirely.

Beyond the lifeless design, the practical issues pile up.  The air conditioning struggled, the finishing feels rushed, the shower pressure is pitiful, the lighting system is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle made by the Zodiac Killer, and the bathrooms are so tiny you need to flush regularly to preserve space.  The wardrobes barely allow a carry-on to open, toiletries are non-existent, and the pièce de résistance?  Awful, tacky, fake gold-painted toothbrushes that look like all your worst Christmas presents arrived at once.  The only redeeming feature was the Toto toilet and a magic glass panel for the bathroom.  I could have done with more magic though—like something that made me disappear entirely.

Just to make it even more unwelcome, at one point, we were told off for having the audacity to take a walk, which happened to be near the residences.  Half the hotel is dedicated to these residences, which, in a way, is an act of mercy. At least they spared another 795 poor souls from enduring a stay here. I can only assume the owners bought them as a charitable act, never actually living in them.

There are so many restaurants you could probably write an entire blog just listing them—though the whole place felt suspiciously like being in London.  Milos, Heston, Nobu… you get the idea.

Breakfast felt like it was designed by Lucifer himself, drawing heavy inspiration from the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.  It’s an airport food court in disguise, desperately trying to pass as an upscale restaurant.  Once inside, the sheer scale and chaos hit like a tidal wave.  Navigating the space required a tour guide, though a guide leading you the hell outta there would have been far more useful.  It’s buffet-only, and securing anything feels like embarking on a full-scale expedition.  Multiple staff members are involved in the process, yet somehow none of them are actually there to help. The staff aren’t so much waiters as they are glorified table-clearers.  It’s not about service; it’s about crowd control.  It’s about keeping the cattle moving.

The spread is undeniably vast—there’s an ice cream counter, an endless sea of pastries, and a cheese and salad station that could rival a small country in size.  Yet despite all this, everything manages to feel strangely low-end.  It’s like getting herpes from Brad Pitt—you might have a good moment or two, but you’re still stuck with herpes.

The only nice thing I can say is if you’re into people-watching, it’s prime territory.  Unfortunately, the place is packed with people who look like they were beta testers for plastic surgery.  You know the type—the human equivalent of the final scene in The Substance.

Then we went to the Royal Club, and oh boy, what a difference.  Actual civility.  Actual service.  Actual glimpses of what a luxury hotel is supposed to be.  The buffet may be smaller, but at least you don’t have to wade through a human swamp to get to it.  That said, when I asked for some berries, the first response was to vaguely point me in the direction of the buffet, leaving me to navigate the logistical nightmare of acquiring berries without a single bowl in sight.  Or berries.  To be fair, the staff were mostly pleasant—just clearly shackled by layers of mind-numbing bureaucracy that seemed designed to hinder rather than help.

Yes, there’s a spa, but you’ll have trouble using any of the facilities unless you book a treatment.  Yes, there’s a gym, but despite my best efforts, I still look like I’m auditioning for The Machinist, and I hold Atlantis personally responsible for this.

If I’m being generous, at night the place takes on a certain beauty—lights reflecting off the endless glass, a fleeting illusion of sophistication.  But like everything else here, it’s all surface-level charm desperately trying to disguise the gaping void of substance underneath.  The club lounge was decent, and yes, the hotel is quite photogenic.  But then again, so was the Titanic.

For entertainment, you can take a leisurely stroll to the water park conveniently located right next door.  All truly great hotels have a gigantic water park next to them.  It’s well known that the alternative ending to Pretty Woman is Julia Roberts escaping on a rubber dingy down a water chute.

But if water slides aren’t your thing, don’t worry—there’s always the option to entertain yourself: the sheer, crushing absurdity of being here.  You might start with a polite chuckle at the towering excess, the sheer scale of it all.  Then, as you wander through yet another soulless corridor in search of a sense of purpose you’ll never find, that chuckle deepens into a full-bodied laugh, the kind that makes passersby glance nervously at their children and steer them away.  And before you know it, you’re doubled over in hysterics, your mind unravelling in the face of an unrelenting parade of LVMH swag, themed restaurants, and inexplicable aquarium walls embedded in random corners of the resort.  Eventually, you’ll find yourself cackling into oblivion, whispering ‘kill me’ under your breath like it’s some Lovecraftian nightmare from which you can’t escape.

And yet, despite it all, here you are.  Trapped.  Another willing victim of this man-made mirage, where everything is designed to delight and yet somehow leaves you feeling as hollow as the faux palm trees dotting the lobby.  You wonder if you’ll ever leave.  And if you do, will the outside world even recognise you anymore?

Atlantis The Royal is the kind of place you come to admire, not to actually endure.  I admire the London Underground too—it’s an impressive feat of engineering—but I wouldn’t want to live in it.  This hotel is for people who have everything but understand nothing.  It’s obvious that an obscene amount of money was thrown at this place, yet somehow, it delivers nothing of value.  It’s mainstream luxury, designed for those who don’t understand luxury.  Overpriced, overhyped, and underwhelming.  It’s by people that stand in front of banners claiming “mission accomplished”, without realising the amount of work that’s still to come.

Yet for all the money, the finish is shoddy, and the maintenance is non-existent.  I wouldn’t accept it in my own house, and I’m not exactly living in a palace.  In fact, I’m writing this from a train station bathroom that smells like a crime scene and has more personality than this entire hotel.  How it’s managed to rack up awards is beyond me—because what is it, really?  Just another Vegas hotel.  Does sticking it in the Middle East suddenly make it exotic?

Normally, I make a point of writing down all the facilities and offerings.  I didn’t bother here.  What’s on offer is irrelevant because it has everything.  Want a golden unicorn-shaped dildo?  It’s yours.  Some overpriced polyester bag plastered with an obnoxious logo?  Yours.  There’s everything, but somehow, it offers nothing.  It’s just another mega resort.  Just another cruise ship on land.  A vacuous, hollow shell of a building with no soul—a place that proves you can have all the money in the world and absolutely no clue what to do with it.  Next time, just burn the money.  That’s right.  Just burn it.  Don’t give it to charity, they might actually help someone.  Take it out in $1 bills and light it up.  The rising temperatures might finally trigger a climate emergency, cleansing the world of mankind.

Staying here feels like having a scab you know you shouldn’t pick.  You’re fully aware it’s going to end badly, but you go ahead anyway.  Then you bleed everywhere, ruin your favourite cashmere jumper, and your wife runs off with the postman.  It’s inevitable.  It’s a hotel designed for people who never want to leave a hotel—my kind of people.  But in this case, you’re sharing it with thousands of others, which is very much not my kind of people.  I only spoke to one other guest: a woman from LA by the pool who had fled to escape the wildfires.  Has this woman not suffered enough?  The sadness in her eyes could have been from the thought of losing her home—or the realisation that this was her temporary refuge.  I couldn’t tell.

At least the Burj Al Arab has something distinctive about it, even if that distinctiveness is hideous.  Atlantis will vanish from memory faster than a thought crossing Joe Biden’s mind.  It’s about as personalised to your needs as being kidnapped.  Rules dominate everything, to the point where every time someone approached us, I instinctively assumed I was about to be scolded—and more often than not, I was right.  Sitting on the beach at 6:55 pm?  Forget it, they’re closing, and you’re out.

Between 10 am and 1 pm, the kids’ club is technically open but completely unsupervised, meaning you have to stay there yourself.  And don’t think you can sit there, you have to follow your children around like they’re dangerous animals and might maul someone any second.  Ok, that point is fair, they must have met my kids.  From 2 pm onward, only kids over three are allowed, and no adults.  It meant Alia, our two year old couldn’t go in.  We wanted Alia to sit with her sister to finish the last 20 mins of a movie – can’t do that.  Could she go play on the pirate ship then?  Nope, not allowed even though she can in the morning and no one is there. Luxury is about flexibility and a place like this offers none.  You’d make more luck negotiating with a brick wall.  The employee handbook here must be 1,000 pages long, mostly covering what guests can’t do, with a brief appendix begrudgingly mentioning hospitality.

And there’s more security here than actual staff, but what exactly are they securing?  No one could possibly make it worse.  If someone rolled up with a bulldozer, humanity should send them a thank-you card.

I’m not even mad about the three days I have to endure here—though judging by my blood pressure, I might only have six left to live.  What truly infuriates me is the fact that the journalism industry has forced me, once again, to do their job for them.

Conclusion

May god have mercy on us all.