Jumeirah Dar Al Masyaf

The attitude towards guests is terrible. They didn’t reacted on our request , and moved us to another room only on 3 day. We were given the farthest and noisiest room near roads . They take a very long time to respond to requests. They couldn’t remove the deposit from the card - they blocked our cards from the room, I had to go argue and sort things out! The children could not get into the room. We are disappointed with this attitude. Service for 3️⃣…. Read less

This is our second visit to Dar Al Masyaf and 10th visit to Jumeriah properties and I love this hotel but its simply not as good as last time. This is a problem when you go back to properties where you've had such a good time and outstanding service, but I feel that Jumeriah are not helping themselves with some of the changes they've made. Before Arrival We were on the half board option and when doing our research we were being told to book restaurants early. We tried to do this online, and nothing was available. This panicked us a bit and we emailed the hotel about some reservations. Initially we had no reply but after chasing them up we did get reservations at the Hide and Zeng He's. We did try to book brunch at Al Qasr but this was a nightmare. No one could confirm if we had a reservation or not, so we booked Bubbalicious at the Westin! The poor communication and lack of information will be a feature of my review. I've noticed a few comments on TA which say don't bother with Emails or WhatsApp. Phone up. Check In. We arrived at 9.30pm and this process was really poor. They gave us no real information (apart from scan this.... Its the e-butler!). We'd travelled for 10 hours and no one asked if we were hungry and wanted to use our evening evening meal credit. We had previously asked to stay in or near Villa 12 again and they actually put us in Villa 26, which could not have been any further away! We asked if we could pay to upgrade and were told no. We are full. The hotel was not even close to being full and when we went on the website it would have let us have book any room we wanted, so we were a bit confused about this. Hotel Grounds Simply outstanding!! Abra and buggy staff were amazing. Room Huge for 3 of us. Plenty of bottled water, coffee machine and we overlooked the lagoon. One of the reasons we booked here was the evening drinks in the courtyard. We like pre dinner drinks and chatting to other travellers. We weren't told that the 6-8 time had changed to 5-7. This has a big impact as people don't tend to use this facility anymore. They tend to get drinks in their room as get ready to go for dinner. This is a real shame, as in the past it was a very social gathering where you got to know other guests and your butler. The change to an E-butler hasn't helped here. One one evening we sat around for 20 minutes wondering how do we get a drink? Do we help ourselves? Do we order on the app? Again, nothing explained. I think they have 1 person covering 2 or 3 villas (which is 27 rooms). A few years ago it was one person per villa so it was a much more personal experience. Times change and technology must be embraced, but just tells us!! I think the problem was made worse by the fact that the hotel was so quiet. Quite rightly, Jumeriah don't want to pay staff to just sit around. However, the prices are going up. We did complain about this and eventually spoke to a duty manager. In fairness they were brilliant in addressing our issues, but it could have been easily avoided. I can't stress enough how fantastic management were in responding to our issues! Pools and beach Stunning!! There is no better view in Dubai. Restaurants Breakfast was very good in the buffet and French Riviera. In previous visits you could have breakfast in any of the Jumeriah hotels. You can't anymore. No one mentioned this. We were on the half board options with lots of restaurants to choice from. We ate at the the Hide, Zheng He, Arboretum buffet, the pool bar and the Dhow and Anchor at JBH. All were brilliant apart from the Hide. This is a 'high end' steakhouse and the half Board option was not explained very well and we ended up with a £100+ bill just to use the half board menu. Our chicken took 70 minutes because it apparently needed to rest! I think they just forgot about us. Wild Wadi Brilliant as usual with plenty of buggy's available. The staff operating the buggy's and Abra's are a real strong point of the hotel. Summary A stunning hotel in a prime location, with beaches, water park and the Madinat Souk. Brilliant staff, but the changes that Jumeriah are making aren't being communicated and it caused us a lot of issues when you're paying nearly £1k a night. 10 visits to Jumeriah properties but sadly its time for a change. Read less