Summer Bargains for Brummies

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Dubai is embarking on a bargain basement bonanza as the summer kicks in, flogging off package tour deals that beggar belief. There’s no doubt that chaps over at the Dubai Tourism Promotion Board have been busy little bees.

Local residents could perhaps be forgiven a sigh of frustration at just how much better off the out-of-towners are going to be – the rates on offer to UK residents, for instance, smash the rates we’re quoted locally into a cocked hat. In fact, not only do the Great British Public get a better deal on hotel rooms than we do, they get a better deal on flights too!

The Metropolitan Hotel, Dubai is offering three nights of four star luxury, including flights to and from Birmingham, for £399 from August 11 to September 18th. Now, for a couple, that works out to a total flight, hotel and breakfast deal of Dhs4,788.

At locally quoted rack rates, three nights in the Metropolitan (inc b/fast and tax) in that same period will set you back a cool Dhs1,350. So when you add the cost of two flights to Birmingham (cheapest EK return rate for two DXB-BIR is Dhs7,050), you’re looking at locals paying an equivalent package deal bargain of just Dhs8,400 – nearly double what the tourists will pay!

Book in UK deal - £798 for two (Dhs4,788)
Book in UAE deal - £1,400 for two (Dhs 8,400)

The Atlantis Hotel, Dubai is offering three nights of five star whale shark endangered species-teasing luxury for just £549, including Birmingham connections. Now locally, a three night booking in August will set you back Dhs2,880 including taxes and note that’s a weekday – weekends aren’t available. So we’re already talking £480 for the hotel, before we add in that Dhs7,050 flight cost – a couple of Dubai residents could fly to Birmingham and back, staying at the Atlantis for three nights for a mere £1,655 compared to the cool £1,098 package being offered to travellers coming the other way – so living in Birmingham means a saving of £557 on living in Dubai when you holiday in the sun – enough for a third package!

Book in UK deal - £1.098 for two (Dhs 6,588)
Book in UAE deal £1,655 for two (Dhs 9,930)

But it gets better! Let’s start to book a room at Le Royal Meridien Beach Resort and Spa, whose cheapest local B&B deal is Dhs 3,458 for the three nights. Add in our Brummie flight at Dubai prices and you’re looking at paying Dhs10,508 for three nights of Dubai bliss for two – the package price for your sun-seeking Brummie would be £499 each, or a total of Dhs5,988 – Dhs4520 (or £753) LESS than a Dubai resident would pay at locally quoted rack rates !

Book in UK deal - £998 for two (Dhs 5,988)
Book in UAE deal - £1,751 for two (Dhs 10,508)

If you buy your EK tickets in Birmingham rather than Dubai, BTW, they’ll cost as little as Dhs 6,100 - £1,017. So a Brummie based Brummie is instantly Dhs950, or £158 better off than a Dubai based Brummie flying the same sector – let alone the more expensive local hotel rates.

Never mind. Don't forget The Oceanic's doing Dhs199 a night for a double! :)

Slim

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As various posts over the past eight or so months have noted, Gulf News has been cutting back on the carbs and has dropped its weight from a rather turgid 1.3Kg in November 2008 to an average 640g in Feb 2009, a downward trend continued through May, which saw the paper taking up regular exercise and slimming down to an reasonably regular 540g.

It's been feeling lighter recently and I have generally resisted the mildly obsessive impulse to weigh it again, but today's edition felt noticeably more feather-like. And it is - thanks to my trusty weighing scale (the best Dhs19 I've spent at Lal's in a long time) I can report that today's GN is weighing in at 440g, something like a third of its original weight. I have to add the usual caveat - a Dhs19 scale is hardly capable of atomic accuracy.

I think we can all agree there's a trend here - it's hardly rocket science. The fact that the trend is continuing is a worry, though. GN has already apparently shed a number of journalistic jobs - albeit fudging this news with an example of corporate responsibility and transparency that should inform any company wishing to call the skeleton in the cupboard a 'new market opportunity'. Few will welcome the news of more to come.

PermaTweet

This is my Twitter on Paper. I'm oddly proud of it.

It's not actually on paper, it's via JPG, but it's part of the same project by the deliciously oddball New York designer Sam Potts. The idea was to send people a paper version of Sam's Tweets on request. No money or other emolument required, a simply one-way service that made selected Tweets enduring and gave them permanence (Tweets are not archived beyond 48 hours).

It took off so quickly and widely that a JPG based overseas service was introduced. I got in there just before Sam got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of requests for this very strange and almost completely useless Twitter-based service and had to stop providing Tweets made permanent on request.

Is this art? Is it rock and roll? Is it promotion?

I'm not entirely sure...

Exploring Jordan

Channel 4 DJ Neil 'Jay' Grayson asked what there was to do in Jordan. And here's an answer. It's not necessarily the answer, but it's an answer!

I do miss the place, you know... probably why I ended up writing this rather long post.

Jordan provides the setting for Mr Unpublishable's second book, Olives, and is also somewhere I have spent a hell of a lot of time and where I have many good friends. Here are some of the many excellent reasons why it's well worth taking a long weekend break, at the very least, and exploring the place for yourself. And yes, thank you, if you're from the Jordan Tourist Board, you can send the envelope with used 10JD notes. Thanks.

Oh! Talking of which, do make sure you get there with 10JD per person in your pocket in local currency for your visa otherwise you'll just have to leave the visa queue, change money and rejoin it - which ain't fun.


AMMAN

I stay at the Grand Hyatt for preference, but the Four Seasons is also a great hotel. The Kempinski in Shmeisani is cheaper and not bad. Martinis in the Four Seasons is a famous Alexander treat, taken in the Square Bar in the summer and the downstairs lobby lounge by the fireside in the winter. The Hyatt's fish restaurant 32 North is expensive but stunning, its Italian is also famously good and Indochine downstairs is also excellent.

The Citadel
The Citadel is the central of Amman's original 7 hills (it sprawls over 22 or so now, apparently) and contains important Roman, Islamic and Byzantine remains. Brilliantly, the government has excavated to the most important era in each case and it's a great place for a wander.

The Ampitheatre
Still used for live performances, Amman's ampitheatre is a brilliantly preserved piece of Roman architecture. Standing on the brass button centre stage and talking in a normal voice not only lets you be heard at the furthest seat but you also feel the pressure of your own voice on your ears. Spooky. To the right side of the stage there's a small but wonderful museum of bedouin things which you should not at any price miss.

The Motor Museum
King Hussein was an avid car collector and this museum is based around his personal collection. Well worth a visit.

The Eastern City
I like to wander around the streets in the Eastern City, particularly around the bird market, and just soak it all in. It's pretty full-on and don't for the love of God keep your wallet in your back pocket.

North of Amman
See the castle at Ajloun and the Roman ruins at Umm Queis. There's a smashing Arabi restaurant at Umm Queis around the back of the ruins and overlooking the Golan with a quite marvellous view and I recommend it most highly.

Do not leave Jordan without seeing Jerash. Simply don't. It's a huge Roman city, preserved with amazing streets and buildings - also called the city of 1,000 pillars, it rivals Petra in its wonderfullness but doesn't get as much attention as the Rose Red City. You can do Jerash, Umm Queis and Ajloun in one day, but you'll just end up rushing things. Better to take two days over 'em IMHO.


Eats
You can eat really well in Amman these days. Arabic restaurant Fakhreddine is one of the great restaurants of the Levant. Vinaigrette is popular with the beau monde, as is Whispers, both near Shmeisani. The Blue Fig is a great place to have drinks with friends.


THE DEAD SEA AND ALL THAT

I love driving down to the Dead Sea and my preferred hotel has always been the Movenpick, although the Kempinksi and Marriott are preferrd by Jordanians in general. The spa at the Movenpick is great, we found the staff and treatments at the Marriott Spa were better. The Marriott can get very noisy with families. The Dead Sea itself is obviously a treat - and always significantly warmer than Amman.

The Baptism Site
A few kilometres north of the hotels on the Dead Sea, tucked away on a left hand turn off the main road back to Amman, is the site where John the Baptist baptised Jesus and a lot of other people. It's also legendarily where Elijah ascended to heaven on a chariot. You can see the sad remains of the River Jordan here and also look out over the tamarisks to Jericho. A must-see.

Madaba
Madaba is the site of the oldest and most important Byzantine mosaic in the Levant and also the location of Haret Al Jdoudna, one of my favourite restaurants in the Middle East. Dunno why, just love the place.

Mount Nebo
It was here that Moses showed his people the promised land and on a clear day it's some view. The mosaics preserved here are simply beautiful and Nebo is a must-visit, even if you're the Pope. Popes like Nebo.

Kerak
The crusader castle in Kerak, on the escarpment overlooking the southern Dead Sea, is important and worth visiting. There are Christian families living here descended from the Crusaders, which is pretty bonkers if you think about it. TE Lawrence was here.


PETRA

We are very fond of driving down to Petra from Amman on the King's Highway (criss-crossing the railway line that old TE spent so much time trying to blow up) and then looping back up using the 'old road' and travelling through Tawfileh (the butt of Jordanian 'dumb person' jokes), past Wadi Dana (where microfinance projects have created an ecoresort and also jewellery makers whose fine silversmithery can be bought here and at the Wild Cafe in Amman) and Kerak then up the Dead Sea to the spa hotels. It's a fantastic drive that will take you through the deep country, past escarpments, hills and bedouin encampments. It's deliciously Mediterranean countryside and you'll go through a range of small townships where the rural poverty can be a tad 'in your face'. Poor people in Jordan are very poor indeed and rich people are very rich. Everyone you meet will delight in telling you that Jordan has no middle class, and although that's no longer quite the case, it's not a bad model as they go.

Stay at the Movenpick in Petra. It's the closest to the old city and it's a dandy hotel. Drinks and shisha on the rooftop are a big treat.

You should really give Petra a couple of days and the night-time tour down into the 'Rose Red City as Old As Time Itself (TM)' is popular and visually incredible. The 3,000 year-old Nabatean city is every bit as impressive as you'd think and then some. You walk quite a way down into the Siq (yes, I'd take one of the carriages but haggle) before coming to the Treasury and then down into the city built up into the hillsides around you. There are a bunch of hawkers and gee-gaw sellers here and that's just fine. Further down the track, you'll come to the Roman ruins and at the bottom there's a museum that's worth a trip. From here, you can walk up in every direction, trekking through the hills back up to find side streets and bits n bobs all over the place.


THE SOUTH

Wadi Rumm is famously beautiful and can take days to explore. It's something of a schlep from Amman, so I'd suggest staying over at Aqaba, which is the Red Sea resort town of Jordan, home to the ASEZA free trade zone and hotels with famously indifferent service. If you thought you'd be rediscovering the little down in Lawrence of Arabia, forget it. Aqaba itself is about as charming as Gordon Brown.

I am quite sure I have missed out thousands of things to see and do in Jordan, but then you can have fun discovering them for yourselves.

I hadn't realised I had made so many trips here over the years until a couple of years ago when I was staying at the Hyatt just after the Amman bombings. I actually went over to attend an art exhibition protesting the event, which we sponsored. I still have two of the prints from the event and they are very dear to my heart, tragically both are calligraphies of the 60 victims' names. There were only 16 guests in the hotel and I went to my room to find a gift-wrapped book on my bed. I thought it was a kind of 'thanks for staying with us because the lobby's a wreck and nobody else will come here because of the bombing' gift, but when I opened it I realised that it commemorated my fortieth stay at the Hyatt! In all, I must have made over 60 trips to Jordan and they have left me with an abiding fondness for the country and its people. I like the country so much, I wrote a book about it...

Sharjah Summer Breaks from AED99

Image by kevin (iapetus) via Flickr

Sharjah Summer Breaks from AED99 is a startling promise to make in an advertisement (Gulf News today) and one that is guaranteed to pique curiosity from would-be summer breakers.

But that's the deal - Sharjah's going for it and I'd commend an overnighter to the 'Cultural' emirate most highly.

There’s a hell of a lot to see and do in Sharjah, from a wide range of museums, art galleries and restored souq areas through to desert trips taking you to the idyllic Indian Ocean retreat of Khor Fakkan (and its venerable but still fun hotel, The Oceanic) and the important mangrove swamps of Khor Kalba. An overnight in Sharjah would be well worthwhile, IMHO, for many people - particularly the many living in Dubai who've never bothered going next door. These posts about stuff to do around the UAE might help

Don't forget that Sharjah's 'dry', but don't let that put you off, either.

Go crazy this summer and give one of these a bash - there are more on the Sharjah Tourism website, but I've cherry picked the best of 'em here.

FIVE STAR

Radisson Blu
Tel: +9716 5657777
Dhs 299
The Radisson SAS. This is a pretty nice hotel, actually, with a good pool and beach and does simply fantastic Lebanese food. The Friday buffet’s not unpleasant and I'd recommend the place as easily the best hotel in Sharjah.

Holiday Inn Corniche
Tel: +9716 5599900
This hotel’s on the Buheirah Lagoon, in the city centre near the famous Blue Souq (Souq Al Markazi).
Dhs 255 Single
Dhs 299 double

FOUR STAR

Sharjah Rotana
Tel: +9716 563 7777
On the site of the old Palace Hotel, plonked just on the edge of the bustling Al Arouba souq area, this business hotel always struck me as a slightly odd place. Never been in it.
Dhs 200 double

Marbella Resort
Tel: +9716 5741111
The Marbella has been there for donkey’s and is next to the Holiday Inn. It’s all chalets and has always seemed pleasant enough to me. I do recommend a visit to the website, which is highly nostalgic and will take you back to 1970s retro brochure design and first generation website design.
Dhs 199 junior suite

Sharjah Carlton Hotel
Tel: +9716 5283711
This is one of the older properties in Sharjah and used to look pretty imposing back in the 1980s. It just looks old now, but is not unpleasant, has a lovely beach and is near the old fishing village of Al Khan and Sharjah’s aquarium, which is well worth a visit. Its website describes it as situated on the lush Arabian sea and so, I guess, it is.
Dhs 199 single
Dhs 225 double

Oceanic Hotel, Khor Fakkan
Tel: +9716 238 5111
This is, again, an older hotel with distinctive round porthole windows and is absolutely fine to stay in, has a lovely beach and pool and is ideal for exploring the East Coast of the Emirates.
Dhs 99 single
Dhs 199 double

Personally, I'd go for the Oceanic for sheer value and the East Coast and the Radisson for facilities.

BTW, I got the pricings above from the most helpful Mohammed at the Tourism call centre - 800 SHJ to you!

Thanks to Rob, whose comment on the original post (which I scrubbed) alerted me to the fact that Sharjah Tourism's website had been updated and my whinge about it's lack of content had been addressed even as I was whingeing!

Plug

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As you may or may not know, I have the pleasure to work for the Middle East's first technology specialised public relations and communications agency, Spot On Public Relations. I don't often blog directly about work stuff, although my work obviously informs many of my opinions, but I'm going to talk shop for a second here.

Over the years, Spot On has moved from being a pure-play tech and telecom agency to encompass non-tech clients, from 'Freej' originators Lammtara through Virgin Megastores to publishing company ITP and media consultancy DMA. We still retain tech clients, of course, including IBM and Lenovo, as well as my favourite client (oddly enough), printer company Oki Printing Solutions. And we work with a lot of other companies too, from hotels through to mining and finance through to consumer electronics.

One of the things that's started to happen at work, something that has been a pleasant surprise, is that the old tech heritage has come back to inform how we work with a new wave of clients who are most definitely not technology companies, but who are using technology in their work - increasingly in their communications work. When Spot On started, the Internet was a new, and often regarded as threatening, phenomenon in the Middle East and we were very involved in arguing the case FOR the Internet - it's something that resonates with many conversations I have today, believe me.

Social media, you may have noticed it's taking up more and more of my thinking and even blog posting (And yes, I have had complaints), but it is starting to drive some very interesting ideas for us - increasingly in line with my personal dislike of 'big business' and the ways that 'big business' has been behaving.

I like the idea of companies being more open to communicating with the little guys, actually talking to their customers rather than glibly slapping 'customer-centric' on their brand values and then handing down the call centre to the nearest monkey. I like the idea that customers and companies could actually work together to make things work better - because the customers want to be involved and the companies are willing to listen. I like consumers having voice. (You may have noticed!)

I think we're heading towards more of that stuff and it excites me. Sorry, that's the geek in me showing through.

Anyway, this is all a thinly disguised plug for you to go join Spot On's fabby Facebook group, which you can subscribe to if you want to get more 'inside track' on the stuff we're doing with clients and in the social media space, as well as links to things like interviews and articles from Spot On people and the people we work with in our 'ecosystem' of like-minded partners.

Also, if you've a mind to, you're more than welcome to subscribe to a few of Spot On's other 'social media' resources:

Twitter. The Spot On Twitterfeed tends to focus on sharing news of interest to those who follow media, journalism, new media and Internet innovation. It's quite popular.

Netvibes. Arguably one of the most useful RSS readers, Netvibes allows you to aggregate content from multiple sources, from blogs through to newswires and even sources such as Twitter and Google Alerts. Spot On's public Netvibes page is a great 'one stop' resource for you to swing by every day and check out pretty much everything that's happening in Middle East media, journalism and social media.

Delicious. This is another strong media-related resource, where we basically share our bookmarks of interesting stories that are media, PR and journalism related. Again, quite a powerful resource for anyone that wants to get a fast snapshot of what's happening in these areas across the Middle East.

We use a range of other social media platforms for a number of purposes, audiences and clients - but I thought these might be interesting/useful to many of the people who swing by this blog.

[EndPlug]

The Amateur Anthropologist

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I discovered Google Silences yesterday. What’s a Google Silence? It’s when you’re having a big fat old argument with a colleague that’s degenerated from debating solid, intelligent, factually based arguments into ‘Is so!’, ‘Isn’t so!’.

It's at this point that the person you’re arguing with goes suddenly and terribly quiet.

Why?

Because they’re Googling the topic you’re arguing. A Google Silence is followed by two possible outcomes.

“Ha! I OWN you, punk!”

Or

“This is a stupid argument anyway and I think we should move on.”

Tortuous

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Here's something I think is worth sharing. It came to me (and therefore to you) by a tortuous route, I found the link on a comment to an article on Australian marketing uber-blog, Mumbrella (sorry Tim, can't be arsed with the caps and things). But that's how the Internet works, no?

It's the story of how the UK's Guardian newspaper crowdsourced a complex data mining job, using its online readers to help it sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of public records. By making the whole exercise accessible and enjoyable to the public, The Guardian effectively managed to arrange for something like 35,000 people to help intelligently sift through over 170,000 pages of public records unearthed by the great Commons Expenses Scandal. The result was that The Guardian managed to comb 170,000 pages of data in 80 hours, extracting the valuable stuff for its journalists to work on.

It's here. The site, Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is a must-add for your RSS feed if you have any interest at all in the evolution of journalism in the digital age.

I love this case study because it's a really smart application of technology in the spirit of the IBM PC and the Toyota MR2 (two of my favourite things, both originally cobbled together by inspired innovators on shoestring budgets raiding their companies' parts bins). I love it because it's a witty and smart piece of journalistic initiative.

But most of all, I love it because it shows how much more powerful you are when you enlist the help of your customers in the development of your product - which means respecting your customer enough to believe they are worthy enough to begin to possibly understand the arcane intricacies of your unique and difficult profession. Calling for feedback, input, insight or participation from a wider commuinty extends your reach beyond your own organisation's staffing capabilities and brings a wider range of heads to a problem - sometimes solutions to a problem can come marvellously quickly from the uninvolved. It has the potential to broaden your capability to innovate, creates a stronger sense of connection and ownership from customers and folds marketing neatly into product development.

The article on Mumbrella was, incidentally, this one, where News Ltd's editorial director is being a goof about Twitter.

The Monster is Dead

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So Michael Jackson's dead. I had to switch off the television to stem the tide of grief. It doesn't seem more than ten minutes ago we were all being entertained by the sight of him dangling children over balconies, facing charges of child molestation and struggling to cope with a mountain of debt from an insane lifestyle that his ailing career could no longer maintain. The world gasped as his increasingly macabre visage leered out at them, caked in make-up and scarred by surgery after surgery, a grotesque mannequin piping platitudes in a ridiculous, squeaky-soft voice.

He died two weeks before the massive series of 'comeback' concerts, a 50 year-old man rehearsing, no doubt, to push himself through punishing routines that would defeat a 20 year-old as he put everything he had into that all-consuming gamble to try and win over the world that had turned its back on him. We can only wait and see if it's confirmed that he rehearsed himself to death.

The villagers chanting 'Kill the monster' as they marched on the castle with their burning brands are now clamouring to get in front of the cameras and wail about how they missed the monster and how he wasn't a monster really, but a globe-spanning entertainer that brought joy to millions and whose loss will be felt by the whole world.

And I sat there wondering why these people who had so much love for Michael had stood by as he sank into penury, turning away from him and tutting at the freak show. The outpouring of saccharine grief was, indeed, too much for me to bear.

Geek

Image by Larsz via Flickr

Some side effects from this morning's Business Breakfast slot, with no particularly massive point to make, it's just that I found them interesting. But then I'm a geek, no?

Google is the place where 30% of the Internet goes every day - and it spends an average of 8.5 minutes of that day on the site. As we know, those minutes are spent looking for stuff and clicking on the results - including those lovely, lucrative little Adwords. In fact, Google's Q1 2009 revenue was equivalent to the entire US ad spend on print media. Not bad for a few clicks.

In fact, Google's revenue is equivalent to something like 17% of total global TV advertising spend ($123 billion according to Informa). That's not bad for a single provider, no? It's certainly bigger than any single network. Google's pretty good at growing stealthily wealthy, actually.

Ranked #4 globally by Alexa, Facebook currently gets 19% of the Internet's eyeballs every day, BTW. Interestingly, people spend over four times as long there, though - an average of 25.3 minutes a day are invested on Facebook.

The time people spend on Google appears to be a little more productive, however, Facebook's revenues for 2008 were $350 million.

Twitter's revenue - and, indeed, its revenue model remains pure speculation...