Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island UAE
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Over the summer we had our first trip to the UAE, staying at Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island. We were looking for an all inclusive resort, somewhere we hadn’t been before, with opportunities to explore. Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island seemed to tick all the boxes!
Booking our holiday
We booked our holiday through Emirates Holidays and it was a great deal for a package option. We’ve never booked or flown with Emirates before and were keen to try something new!
We loved the Emirates flight – although the food was a bit questionable at times and slow to come out. Aside from that, the 30kg luggage allowance was great, staff were lovely and service was good. We would definitely fly with them – and book with Emirates Holidays again too.
Location
Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island is in the Ras Al-Khaimah area of the UAE. We flew into Dubai and it was about an hour drive north to Marjan Island and our base for the two weeks that we had booked.
Although many people class Doubletree Marjan Island as Dubai, it really isn’t Dubai and is a completely different area. Staying at Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island should be seen as a beach holiday, a classic beach resort rather than a classic Dubai holiday.
Accomodation
At Doubletree Marjan Island there are room types to suit all group sizes and needs – from standard guest rooms to villas and connecting suites.
We arrived at the hotel late, after 11pm, and the room we had booked wasn’t available – Two Queen Bed Bay Club Room. I found out then that rooms are allocated on arrival and not on booking – and so as we arrived late we got the short straw with rooms. We had booked a two bed club room but instead had to have a one bed club room, with a sofa bed and an extra bed added. We were told we could switch to the correct room the next day.
This was a real pain, and a frustrating start to the holiday. We unpacked minimally, went to bed and then had a day by the pool the next day. But, I was aware that any new arrivals would get first dibs on the rooms again – so from lunch we basically kept popping back to reception until a room was available for us, and moved rooms.
Our new room was perfect. We just had to get staff to come back to sort the sofa bed out. But, it was nearer the amenities, had a great view and was big enough for all of us comfortably. The previous room, with the bed added, was the exact same size but felt so much smaller as the extra bed was just right in the way!
One thing we noticed, mainly on our first couple of nights, is that the hotel room walls are very thin. We were woken up often by babies crying, people talking loudly in the corridors and general noise. There isn’t much you can do about it aside from being mindful of others.
Aside from that, the room was always really clean, was a great size, had fresh towels whenever we needed them, plenty of storage space and the minibar restocked throughout. There was also a private balcony with comfortable furniture and great views of the resort.
This was our first experience of having a resort holiday – rather than a city break – with all four of us in the same room. But, it worked well – and was much cheaper than having interconnecting rooms or a family suite in the UAE!
Golf carts
Before we arrived at Doubletree Marjan Island we had read many reviews of the resort and one thing that was mentioned a lot was the size of the resort – how big it is – and the fact that there are golf carts, manned by employees, to take you to and from your room if you want to go to reception, for dinner etc.
Having experienced Windjammer Landing in St Lucia, where the shuttle service was very much part of the stay, and necessary to take you up and down the huge hills of the resort, we found the golf carts to be quite unnecessary at Doubletree Marjan Island for us as a family.
The resort isn’t too big, but it is a good size and other than being shown to our room on a golf cart when we arrived – and then moving rooms using the golf cart, despite it only being 100ft away, we didn’t use the golf carts at all during our stay. But, I think if you had babies or young, tired children with little legs, or struggle with mobility, then the golf carts would be fantastic for you.
Food and drink
All Inclusive vs Ultra All Inclusive
When booking Doubletree Marjan Island we discovered that they had All Inclusive as an option but also Ultra All Inclusive. This was our first experience of this but apparently something quite common in the UAE.
The All Inclusive offering at Doubletree Marjan Island isn’t ‘All Inclusive’ as you would expect, having holidayed at beach resorts in Europe or the Caribbean. At Doubletree Marjan Island, All Inclusive includes soft drinks and alcohol from midday to midnight. Outside of these times there’s bottled water, fresh fruit juice or tea and coffee available from select places.
The All Inclusive also includes breakfast, lunch and dinner at the buffet restaurant and a discount on dining at a la carte restaurants and other outlets on site. All Inclusive also included a limited drinks menu compared to the full range available at the hotel.
However, for an extra fee, you can upgrade to Ultra All Inclusive. This includes soft drinks and alcohol from 10am, meals at all the a la carte restaurants on site with no additional cost, the full range of drinks options with just a handful of exclusions and room service between 2am and 6am, giving you access to 24 hour food and drink.
The Ultra All Inclusive also included a fully stocked mini bar that was restocked every day during our holiday. This included bottled water, cans of Coke and Sprite, a juice carton and beers as well as a Kit Kat and Pringles.
We were Ultra All Inclusive and really happy with that decision. It was lovely being able to go and get a cold Coke at 10am by the pool and have a wider variety of drinks available. The cocktail menu isn’t as big as other hotels – there’s only a handful of mocktails – but we really enjoyed them and loved the Iced Coffee and Iced Chocolate too – basically Nesquik with ice in!
Being able to have a la carte dinners, and not just go to the buffet constantly was great and for the price we paid – less than £20 each per day extra for Ultra All Inclusive – it was well worth the extra money.
Al Marjan & Bay Club Buffet
The Al Marjan & Bay Club Buffet is the main place to eat if you’re on All Inclusive. We had breakfast at the buffet every day and it was lovely, although a bit repetitive by the end of our two week holiday.
The staff were lovely, the restaurant was always clean and tidy, but it did get noticeably busier if we had breakfast after 8am. As you’d expect from a muslim country, they don’t serve pork. So there’s turkey bacon at breakfast and chicken sausages rather than what we are used to at home. They weren’t really for us so we just skipped the non-pork options are enjoyed the rest of the buffet.
There was always a really nice variety for breakfast – waffles, pancakes, french toast and plenty of cakes, pastries, bread and fresh fruit. There was also a lot of continental options like cold meats and cheeses, salads and cereal as well as an omelette station that I really enjoyed.
LP loved the more local options that were served at breakfast – enjoying noodles or fried rice even at 7am! They had a great range of foods to suit all tastes and I loved that we could all try something different.
At lunch you can also enjoy the buffet restaurant with table service drinks and the same buffet set up for food. At lunch there were so many cooked options along with a lot of salads, noodles, rice, breads, cakes and desserts. It was a fantastic spread.
The buffet restaurant has two entrances, the Al Marjan entrance in the lobby area and the Bay Club entrance nearer the Bay Club rooms. We found the Bay Club side to be a bit quieter and decorated more opulently but that was the main difference. The food and service was the same whichever side you dined in – although the Bay Club side was only available to guests staying in Bay Club rooms.
In the evening the buffet restaurant is incredibly busy – and we only dined there once as, on Ultra All Inclusive, we had the luxury of being able to dine a la carte at no extra cost. The food was good in the buffet restaurant but it felt like a staff canteen. No real atmosphere, really bright lights, our drinks took forever and just far too busy. I would have hated to dine there in the evening for the full two weeks.
One thing we loved about the buffet restaurant was the children’s area. This was set up for lunch and dinner with children’s favourites – little crustless sandwiches, plain pasta with a choice of sauces and even freshly popped popcorn. Plus, there was always chips, nuggets, pizza and plenty of cucumber in the standard buffet which I know is always appreciated when dining with children.
Before I start talking about the a la carte restaurants, one thing to note is that there is a kids menu which is served at all restaurants and bars. They’ll happily do a double portion of anything for older kids – although, weirdly, they couldn’t do a smaller ‘adult’ pizza. But they have nuggets, fish fingers, meatballs, pasta, sausages etc. All the familiar children’s favourites.
Lobby Lounge
The Lobby Lounge was one of our favourite places to dine that was included on the Ultra All Inclusive package. A more relaxed dining option than the a la carte restaurants, the Lobby Lounge is open all day and offers a range of bar style food – pizzas, salads, pasta or things like burgers or fish and chips.
We went here for lunch most days and for a quick dinner once or twice. Food isn’t the quickest – it takes around half an hour for your order to arrive – but it’s tasty, informal and a much nicer experience than the buffet.
We loved the pizzas, the caesar salad and the club sandwiches and ordered a fruit platter a couple of times when we just weren’t that hungry. Plus, they had a vast drinks menu too – we lost count of the amount of virgin pina coladas and iced chocolates we had in the Lobby Lounge! The staff were always super friendly and helpful too.
Brasserie
The Brasserie is open for breakfast and lunch for anyone on All Inclusive or Ultra All inclusive and offers a quieter option than the main buffet. We really enjoyed it for lunch – especially when they had southern fries chicken available. It was delicious!
We also went to the Brasserie for dinner when it was a French restaurant and it was lovely, although the service was hit and miss – fantastic one time, super slow another. But, the food was consistently fantastic.
The Brasserie have amazing steaks and traditional French cuisine like mussels and French onion soup. We really enjoyed the baked camembert and the cheese plate. This is one restaurant where Little Man made use of the kids menu – and happily had double chicken nuggets and chips!
Sanchaya
Our favourite restaurant was Sanchaya which has a fantastic menu of asian dishes and sushi. We dined at Sanchaya a couple of times and loved the ambience, the low lighting and the great range of starters on offer. The tempura vegetables were amazing!
We could happily have lived off fried rice, noodles and Thai green curry. Every dish was full of flavour and so well cooked. We really could not get enough of it.
Meze
The Meze restaurant was our least favourite, mainly because the timing was off – we’d hit a wall where food was concerned and just could not eat another thing. But also, randomly, the Meze restaurant has a slanted wall covered in mosaic tiles that made us all feel really queasy. That may have just been us though as we were positioned looking right at it. It was really off-putting.
That said, we had a mix of cold and hot meze starters as well as a lot of authentic kebab style meat dishes. They were all well presented and full of flavour, we really just weren’t feeling it, which was a shame.
Vespa
Another of our favourite restaurants was Vespa, a really nice Italian restaurant with a variety of familiar dishes. We had everything from gnocchi and lasagne to pizza and so much pasta. It was fantastic – and always started with a delicious bread basket too.
My only real criticism was that the ravioli only had four pieces in sauce – as a main dish – and across the board the desserts weren’t that great, they all needed work. But, that said, we were so full up by that point that the desserts weren’t much of an issue!
Doubletree Marjan Island also has The Anchor bar, ShoFee Rooftop Bar and the XclusiV Night Club but we didn’t try any of those so can’t comment on them. We had planned to go to The Anchor bar – as it offers typical fast food – but we were put off by the smoking policy there as smoking is allowed inside at that venue.
All of the bars across the swimming pools and beach had great customer service. They always had welcoming smiles and banter which was appreciated, even at peak times when it was busy.
There were also ice lollies available from the pool bars in the afternoon but we only had them once and they basically melted off the stick before we had a chance to eat them. It was just so hot!
Room service
Room service is available throughout the resort however, this incurs an additional change aside from between 2am and 6am for Ultra All Inclusive guests. We didn’t use this service as there were plenty of other dining options across the resort.
Swimming
We spent the biggest chunk of our holiday swimming – both for fun and because it was necessary to cool down in the heat! Unlike other countries, where pools are heated to an optimum temperature, the pools at Doubletree Marjan Island are chilled to perfection. They are beautifully cool and just what you need on a boiling hot day in the UAE.
There are a few pools to choose from at Doubletree Marjan Island. The main pool is huge and long, and has rows of sun beds all along it. It’s the most popular pool, gets really busy and has the Boardwalk Pool Bar at one end.
The Infinity Pool was nearer to our room and is much smaller than the main pool but still has sun loungers all around it and looks out across the beach and bay. There’s a pool bar right next to it and it was much quieter than the main pool.
There’s also an adults only pool, which we didn’t use but that looked beautiful – with floating pillows to lounge on and lots of loungers all around it.
We also discovered a few days before we left, another large pool at the opposite end of the resort but it’s far away from toilets and the bar so not somewhere we would have chosen to spend time.
Doubletree Marjan Island also has a children’s pool which is much shallower than the other pools and is nicely shaded, making it perfect for little ones, even in the extreme hear of the UAE in the summer!
To get a sunbed by the pool you really do have to be there by 7am – whether that’s at the main pool or the infinity pool. If you don’t need to be near the pool there are sun loungers available further away later in the day. But, there are also people who pay the lifeguards/staff to reserve beds for them or reserve beds and then just don’t use them until the afternoon. It was incredibly frustrating and not something we’ve experienced to this extent before.
The pools were fantastic and we loved them. The kids were in and out of them for most of the day and Dave and I broke up stints in the pool with time laying in the shade, reading and enjoying cold drinks. However, from the very first morning we were aware of the ‘sun bed wars’ at Doubletree Marjan Island and it’s a case of if you can’t beat them, join them.
The beach
We really loved waking up to the view of the beach in the morning – although there was slight noise of the building work until the resort woke up when the normal hustle and bustle noises replaced the work noise. This wasn’t a problem though and something we didn’t notice that often.
The beach was beautiful but the sand, sea and general weather was just too hot for most of us. This meant the beach was generally really quiet compared to the pools and there were always a lot of sun beds available whenever you wanted them.
We only went to the beach a couple of times and were surprised about the lack of fish. We were hoping to go snorkelling or diving during the trip but the visibility is really poor and there was hardly a fish in sight.
There was also a natural gym built on the beach, mainly made of logs and other wooden equipment. This is a fantastic facility but really wasn’t used very much due to the heat. However, the hotel does also have an indoor gym although we didn’t use it.
Towels
When you check in to Doubletree Marjan Island you are given towel cards for each member of the party. You swap these at the pools for towels each day and then give them back at the end of the evening to get a pool card back. This worked really well and you could get fresh new towels whenever you wanted them throughout the day.
Water sports
There are no water sports included at Doubletree Marjan Island, they all incur an additional cost. We found the prices to be quite expensive so didn’t utilise any of the water sports on offer. However, they seemed to have a good selection available and were open from morning through to the evening each day.
There was also a fairly small but fun water park on site at no additional cost. This was great for all ages and somewhere to cool off and enjoy for half an hour when the heat got too much! At the beach there was also a climbing structure set out to sea where you could jump or slide into the water. Everyone seemed to love this and there were always lifeguards on hand to keep everything safe.
Entertainment
The hotel has a kids club and the animations team seemed to do a lot during the day. There was a programme of activities available with a sheet showing what was on throughout the week outside the buffet restaurant plus there’s a spa on site if you want some treatments and a serious dose of relaxation.
There’s also a good size play area for children that was half covered to give some shade. We only really saw this being used in the evenings when it got a little cooler.
There wasn’t much to do in the evening – and not enough indoor seating for all hotel guests which seemed to be a problem. As it was so hot everyone wanted to be indoors, making the most of the air con, but there weren’t a huge amount of indoor options. However, we tend to just play card games on holiday so this didn’t really both us – we’d have a drink and games in the lobby bar before dinner and then go back to the room afterwards. If you’re looking for nightlife this probably isn’t the hotel for you.
Excursions
There is a desk in the hotel lobby where you can book excursions. However, we booked one excursion before we arrived in the UAE – a desert safari – and then we hired a car to go on our own days out rather than escorted tours.
We booked the desert safari through Desert Safari Ras Al Khaimah and it was a fantastic excursion. We were picked up from our hotel and had a 4×4 drive through the sand dunes which was fast and exhilarating! We stopped for photos as the sun went down and also got to ride a camel, have a buffet dinner and enjoy a whole evening of entertainment. It was a great night.
For the two week holiday our car hire cost £236 for a Nissan X-Trail through Europcar – which was cheaper than return transfers to the hotel! Plus, there is free parking on site at the hotel. We used the car for transfers but also had three days out in Dubai and it was nice to have our own transport but the drivers in the UAE are like nothing we have experienced before. You have to drive really aggressively but also be so aware of everything constantly. It was hairy at times and definitely something to be aware of! But, we’re still glad we hired the car rather than getting taxis etc. It worked for us.
The UAE during the summer
One of our main concerns when booking this holiday was the heat. Usually the UAE averages temperatures in the 40s in August but I read a lot of reviews and they all said the heat is barable – if you stay out of the sun at peak times, have breaks in the air con and swim a lot. So this is what we did!
The heat, although around late 30s/40 each day, was manageable for us. The pools are really chilled and you just get use to taking a dip to cool off regularly. The air con is also much appreciated inside and in the rooms. All of the tourist areas in Ras Al-Khaimah and Dubai are set up to deal with extreme heat – much better than we are in the UK – and so we just got used to the heat and enjoyed it.
The one thing we weren’t ready for though was how much you sweat in heat like that. We’ve had hot holidays before but we would sit on a sun lounger in the morning and ten minutes later our whole body would be wet from sweat. It was gross – but again, something we got used to fairly quickly.
Wildlife at Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island
There were so many birds around the swimming pools at the hotel and we loved hearing them singing to each other during the day. However, there were times when people left food by the pool and the birds went crazy for it. Plus, the birds loved to take over the cabanas by the pool if they were left unattended for a while. They’d happily sit on the back of sun loungers and watch the world go by!
The hotel also has a lot of cats. We love cats so didn’t mind this at all. They weren’t very harassing and did keep themselves to themselves unless you spoke to them – and unlike a lot of places they are well cared for, fed, neutered etc. Little Man especially loved the familiar feline faces we saw around the resort.
Smoking at Doubletree Marjan Island
Smoking was the main issue for us at Doubletree Marjan Island but I think it is common all around the UAE. We don’t smoke and having people smoking around all the pools, around the pool bars and beach bar got to be really grating. Both smoking and vaping were everywhere outside and inside in the Anchor Bar as well.
Aside from the smoking, we had a great time at Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island. The staff were great throughout, super friendly and helpful. We did have our room cleaned very late one day and had another couple of days where there weren’t any clean towels but we just rang down to reception and they sorted it for us. Beds are changed every 3 days but you can request more regularly if you need it.
The food was fantastic, the pools were great and the whole hotel was well maintained, beautiful to look at and in a really lovely setting. We had a really lovely holiday.
Does Doubletree by Hilton Resort and Spa Marjan Island have room to improve?
I always like to add some things that a hotel could improve upon. And for us, really, there were only a few little niggles:
- Do something to police the sun bed situation. There’s a sun bed policy on display, that says sun beds can only be reserved after 7am and if you’re not sitting on them for two hours then towels will be removed. However, this wasn’t enforced at all.
- Have designated smoking areas. I know, smoking is something you deal with abroad, it’s not the same as being at home. But smoking around children by the pool and in the outdoor seating areas was awful. Designated smoking areas would really help to eleviate this to some extent.
- Allocate rooms on booking, not on arrival. Whether you want a specific type of room, a specific view or need a ground floor room for mobility issues, rooms are only allocated when you get to the hotel. None of the requests are guaranteed. Allocating rooms on booking would make the guest experience so much better and reduce so much stress too.
As you can see, there really aren’t many things to improve on. We had a really nice holiday in the UAE. We probably wouldn’t go back, as we feel like we’ve ticked off that part of the world now, but if we did return we wouldn’t have any qualms about staying at Doubletree Marjan Island again.
You can find out more about Doubletree Marjan Island over on their website and there are some great package deals for the hotel at Emirates Holidays, Virgin Holidays, British Airways, On the Beach, TUI and Away Holidays.
I’ve shared a little Reel of our holiday over on Instagram here:
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