NH Collection Dubai The Palm

It’s a shame I am having to only give 3 stars for this hotel as the hotel itself is great, lovely rooftop pool, big clean rooms, great beach bar/pool area but I have stayed in a lot of midrange Dubai hotels and I expected much more from the service. Before we booked I emailed the hotel and asked if we could swap evening meals for lunch (pretty standard in the Dubai hotels I’ve stayed in) and was advised this was fine, when we arrived the lady checking us in said this had changed, she laughed and said it was a year ago we booked, now this got our back up, a polite explanation would have been ok but as she was so rude we felt the need to show the emails and ask again for lunch to be swapped, eventually they said that this would be ok, we only ate lunch in the hotel twice and both time were refused entry without the embarrassment of explaining and waiting for the ladies to go down to reception to double check on us. The staff were unsure on wether guests got a soft drink with the half board package, we only ate 3 times in the hotel in total and this was charged once but not the other 2 times, the staff were unclear and didn’t know what was included. When we checked in we wasn’t advised on the rules of putting a card down so we could charge items to our room, which is pretty standard practise so would have been fine, on our first day the hotel allowed us to charge items to our room, and as we didn’t know we bought lunch in the sports bar and a few drinks, usually you’d pay this on checkout but the hotel sent a letter through the door to go to reception immediately to pay, we were out so the next day they called our room early in the morning to go down and pay, waking us all up, we felt hounded for the payment so went down to reception and paid in cash, when we went to check out no one was at the checkout desk, we waited 5 minutes or so but our taxi was waiting for the airport so we have to leave the keys and towel cards on the counter and leave, I then had a phone call in the airport to say we hadn’t checked out and needed to pay our balance (the balance they’d hounded us about and had been paid already). It is worth noting that I expressed my unhappiness when I went to pay and asked to speak to a manager but they said they weren't available, so I emailed whilst I was in resort in order to sort these issues and some other niggles and got absolutely no response. We are really disappointed as as mentioned before this could have been an amazing hotel and experience, we were there for a 30th birthday so it was really important for us to get great service but sadly this wasn’t to be. I feel like this could have been sorted really easily with an apology from management whilst we were still at the hotel, a response to my email would have been adequate. A few of the staff were really friendly and helpful but a few were really rude and it sempt like some training was needed, such a shame as the rest of the hotel and holiday was really great. Read less