BootsnAll Travel Community

I'm not sure if I'm asking for the impossible, but I'm looking for a place to stay in Dubai that is not only centrally located in the city, but also fairly cheap. I've looked at the hotels & guesthouses listed on this site as well as hostelworld.com, but they're still between $80-100 UDS per night. It seems to be that Dubai doesn't have any cheap European-style hostels. If anyone has found such a place thay they could recommend I'd really appreciate it. I'm looking very forward to visiting Dubai during my RTW, but I'm not sure if I can actually afford to.

My first caveat is that I haven't spent a lot of time in Dubai....just a few days so there may be others that know more about it. But in my limited experience, yes you are asking for the impossible. Dubai really doesn't cater to the backpacking crowd. We stayed in a hotel not far from the airport and the price was "reasonable". I would say if you can find something between $80 & $100 that is probably as good as you are going to get without going too far out. The problem with going too far out is that getting around Dubai is challenging (traffic jams are common). We rented a car which we used to drive to the east coast for some diving. I tried driving around Dubai and I didn't last very long. Traffic is terrible and construction is EVERYWHERE. We finally hired someone to drive us around in our rental car. Taking a taxi would probably be expensive and frustrating. There are buses but I don't know what those were like. It just doesn't seem like the transportation is keeping up with all the other development around.

I don't know if this helps. Let me know if you have more questions. I know there are others who have been to Dubai and may have more insight.

Thanks very much! Sounds like it's as I expected. Luckily my flight to Bangkok departs at 3:00am on the day I leave, so that's just one more night that I don't have to spend in a hotel haha.

There are a couple of HI hostels outside of town. Both of them seem to have buses from the city center that go there. That's were I'll be staying in a few weeks time.