Palm Island is here to stay

Dubai is a city that thrives on rumours and back in 2004 there was one story that everyone was talking about. The Palm Jumeirah is sinking. I remember being told the tale by engineers, housewives and taxi drivers. Everybody seemed to know about it.

The project’s developer Nakheel took the rumours seriously. After a storm in the Gulf the developer quickly organised a press trip to the island to show journalists that the island had not sunk or been washed away. Little construction work had been done on the island at the time, and most journalists, including myself, remained unconvinced that the island was here to stay.

Seven years later a visit to the Palm is an altogether different experience. There is a steady stream of traffic driving onto the island in the evening and people, including several friends and colleagues, are living in apartments and villas on the trunk and the fronds.

The island’s crescent has been slower to develop. The Atlantis hotel opened with great fanfare in late 2008, but most other hotels were still years away from completion. Those properties are now opening and the Palm is beginning to look like the luxury beach development it was always meant to be. But in the midst of a global recession, can the island attract tourists?

One of the more recent properties to open is the One&Only, The Palm. The boutique hotel is at the end of the island’s crescent and with just 90 rooms and four beach villas it is one of the most exclusive resorts in Dubai, and the rooms rates reflect that.

But tourists still want to pay for luxury. The resort’s general manager Michael Payne tells me the property has performed well since it opened earlier. “We have been at 80 per cent occupancy, which is very good these days.”

The island, like the tourists that visit it, is here to stay.