Desert luxury: a burgeoning oasis, Dubai is the new "in" place for the vacationing CEO

Chief Executive, The, May, 2005 by Rebecca Fannin

New York City entrepreneur Grace Gallo is three years away from turning 50, but she's already emailing friends and family to save the date for a big birthday bash abroad. The location? A place unthinkable just five years ago: Dubai.

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She briefly considered Egypt but selected the bustling Middle Eastern outpost with its over-the-top hotels, restaurants and nightclubs for her early September celebration--even though she knows Dubai will be blaringly hot then. She's planning to blow out her birthday candles at the $666-per-night Burj Al Arab Hotel, a sail-shaped landmark on the Arabian coast. It gets seven stars for its all-duplex suites, 24-hour butler service, rooftop helicopter pad, underwater bar and Rolls-Royce fleet.

"I managed to get 50 people to come to Vienna and stay at the Danieli [Hotel] for a Venetian ball on my 40th birthday, so I think I can do this," says Gallo, an Italian-born, Australian native who runs export marketing consultancy Gallaco from an office in Rockefeller Center.

Dubai is inspiring more global-minded execs like Gallo, who has worked in China and traveled worldwide, to sample Arabia in this safe cosmopolitan oasis of more than 1.2 million people.

Business-class passengers arriving in Dubai after an overnight flight on Emirates Airways feel fairly refreshed, thanks to such comforts as self-adjusting, vibrating seats that recline to become bed hideaways, wireless in-flight email, personalized video on demand and French champagne. Met by a representative of Emirates, they are whisked through immigration courtesy of a no-fee visa instantly granted at the airport and escorted to a curbside Mercedes for a 10-minute ride into the city. Along the wide Sheikh Zayed Boulevard cutting north-south through the city, neon signs and gleaming skyscrapers set against a desert landscape remind one of Las Vegas.

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Though Arabic is the official language here, English is widely spoken and one could almost forget that one is in the Middle East if not for the large number of mosques in the city, the occasional palace and the traditional Arab clothing of the locals. First-time visitors quickly discover that Dubai's shops and museums are closed on Thursdays and Fridays but reopen on Saturday morning, and that alcohol is not served in hotels during Islamic religious holidays and not in restaurants outside the hotels at any time.

Although a recent terrorist attack in nearby Bahrain gave pause to some international business travelers. Dubai has so far avoided the political conflicts of the Middle East. A small coastal village in the 1830s, but today one of seven making up the United Arab Emirates, Dubai is emerging as an "in" destination.

Nearby Doha and Qatar may vie for the title, but Dubai is becoming the region's hub for business. Tourism is one of the growth engines and the number of hotel guests swelled in 2003 by 5 percent to 5 million, many of them Brits and Germans who came to soak up the bright sunshine at the numerous luxury resorts lining the shores of the Arabian Gulf. Travel from the U.S. is picking up, too, after a dip following the September 11 terrorist attacks; the number of U.S. visitors increased to 126,000 in 2003 from 94,000 the year before. Helping boost the numbers is a new, 12-hour direct flight from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Dubai by Emirates Airways with free stopovers and bargain hotel rates for passengers en route to Asia or Africa.

Attracted by strong economic growth, entrepreneurs have poured in from nearby countries. Some 80 percent of Dubai's citizens hail from other regions of the world, many of them from India. Local Indian entrepreneur Kulwant Singh runs Lama Desert Tours & Cruises, the city's first privately owned tour operator. Lama offers spine-tingling, jeep caravan rides into the desert, roller coaster riding over the dunes. His company's all-teak traditional dhow or cabin cruiser takes visitors on dinner cruises along Dubai Creek for an overview of the city.

Grandiose, Dubai is. Ads proclaim nearly every hotel, restaurant, nightclub, show, shopping mall or real estate development as the largest, priciest or most luxurious of them all. One of the most popular resorts is referred to even by locals only by its full name, the One & Only Royal Mirage. Just north of the Mirage, on landfill in the shape of a palm tree, some 2,000 villas, hotels, shopping centers and cinemas are rising.

The project is already sold out and the developer, Nakheel, is planning two larger island developments--one with 300 raw islands in the shape of a globe. Investors can buy part or all of a "country," and one investor wound up buying all the islands that make up the shape of Australia, according to Jacqui Josephson, a marketing exec for The Palm project. She says it's up to investors to decide how to use the property--private island, golf resort, executive retreat or whatever.

There's no shortage of things to do in Dubai. For sports fans, the calendar of events is packed in all but the hottest summer months with the Dubai Marathon, the Tennis Open, the Desert Classic, the World Cup, the Duty Free Grand Prix and so on. For golfers, the city has six championship courses.