The world’s largest cruise ship "ELIZABETH 2 " is reborn as Dubai’s newest hotel

The world’s largest cruise ship "ELIZABETH 2 "

                     is reborn as Dubai’s newest hotel

If you’re heading to Dubai this April, you have any number of hotel options to choose from—the tallest one in the world and even the one on an artificial island in shape of tropical flora. And now the city with a fascination with firsts is adding another feather to its hospitality cap. The Queen Elizabeth 2 (QE2), the famed transatlantic cruiser, is now reborn as a hotel in Dubai’s Mina Rashid port.

Starting 18 April, visitors can step on board the 13-deck boat with a variety of guest rooms, restaurants and bars and even a museum that celebrates the liner’s almost 50-year history. And there is a lot of history. With guests including Queen Elizabeth II and Nelson Mandela, the boat has over the years developed a larger-than-life reputation. At the new hotel, much of that charm and décor has been recreated and restored faithfully.

The hotel, kitted out with its original furniture, paintings and memorabilia, now also has a museum, close to the lobby, showcasing the cutting edge 60s design and tech that went in to building it. Guests staying at the hotel can choose between compact cabin-style standard rooms or splurge on one of two royal suites. The suites come with private balconies overlooking the nearby marina and the port beyond, conservatories and dining rooms.

The floating hotel will also have up to 13 dining options. The five that are operational right now include The Chart Room, a lounge and bar; The Golden Lion, a traditional English pub; The Pavilion, a restaurant with terrace seating; Lido, an all-day diner, The Grand Lounge, a cabaret spot with weekly shows; The Yacht Club, a spot for afternoon tea; and The Queen’s Grill, a fine-dining restaurant that will recreate dishes from the boat’s earliest voyages in 1969. The boat also has a number of meeting spaces and an expansive ballroom that can cater to events.

And for nautical history nuts and visitors looking for a left-of-field experience, QE2 is the spot for you.


At last, the Queen Elizabeth 2 has a home. The storied Cunard ocean liner that retired in 2008 is opening Wednesday as a luxury hotel permanently docked at Mina Rashid in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

It's been a long journey for the stylish ship that launched in 1967 and logged more than 800 transatlantic crossings.Dubai's government bought it in 2008 with the idea of converting it to a hotel. Plans fell through with the country's economic slump, and the QE2 fell into disrepair.

The plan was revived and now the ship has been restored it to its 1960s-era glory. An Associated Press story puts the cost at more than $100 million.Guests will find a hotel as well as restaurants and entertainment attractions on board, though features will be rolled out in phases.

On Wednesday, the ship opens with renovated cabins and suites as well as five of the planned 13 restaurants and bars. Passengers aboard Cunard's modern-day Queen Mary 2 will stop in Dubai and attend the opening.

The 13-deck hotel has kept period furniture, paintings and original porthole windows; TVs and other modern amenities have been added.
The renovation brings back the ship's Chart Room, Golden Lion, Pavilion, Lido, Grand Lounge and Yacht Club. The signature Queens Grill restaurant will offer a tasting menu that includes dishes from her 1960s menu.

An online check of May dates showed flexible prices for rooms starting at $136 a night, excluding taxes and fees.








DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—Britain’s famed Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship will finally open as a floating luxury hotel moored off Dubai, nearly a decade after completing its last ocean voyage.

It’s been another long trip for the ship known as the QE2 to even open to the public, as Dubai’s financial meltdown and years of slow growth nearly sank the project and left the ship languishing at port. After initially planning to gut the vessel, Dubai’s government ultimately decided to restore the ship at a cost of over $100 million (U.S.), down to replicating its 1960s carpeting, with work still underway.

“It’s like walking into a time capsule — this is the ship in 1969. It’s a hotel and a museum,” said Hamza Mustafa, the CEO of Dubai’s Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corp.’s investment arm. “We’ve put in 2.7 million man hours working on her ... making sure that she can really shine.”

“She’s going to live on for many more years now in her final home in Dubai,” he added.

The QE2, built by Cunard and put to sea in 1969, is the second ship the company named after the wife of King George VI, not the current British monarch — hence the number rather than the Roman numeral.

The luxury ship travelled some 6 million miles in decades of service even as airlines came to dominate trans-Atlantic travel. It carried 2.5 million passengers and crossed the Atlantic more than 800 times. Britain requisitioned the ship as a troop carrier for the Falklands War against Argentina in 1982.

In 2007, Cunard sold the QE2 to an arm of the state-run conglomerate Dubai World for 50 million pounds ($100 million). She arrived to Dubai’s Port Rashid the following year as part of a glitzy armada led by a mega-yacht owned by Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, at the height of the former British protectorate’s real-estate bubble.

An economic crash left the QE2’s owners in debt for billions of dollars. Rumours circulated for years after that the ship could be sold. All the while, she sat mothballed at Port Rashid near Dubai’s historic downtown creek, a 149,000-ton reminder of the crash.

Three years ago, the Dubai government’s Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corp. took over the project. It marks the first foray into hotels for the corporation, said Mustafa, who previously served as a managing director at the government-owned developer Nakheel and at the investment arm of Dubai World. He said the corporation planned to open other hotels in the future.

The ship has been hooked up to Dubai’s power grid, but still floats in the Persian Gulf. An Associated Press team that visited the ship Tuesday could feel her list slightly while walking through portions of her completed passageways.

“She lists. She’s supposed to (do) that, she’s a ship,” Mustafa said.

Today, around seven of the QE2’s 13 decks are under operation, with 224 cabins available, Mustafa said. Prices will range from $150 a night in the simplest berthing to $15,000 a night for the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary suites, he said.

A green-hued British pub and other restaurants will serve alcohol, a common practice across Dubai’s hotels. However, its nickel, quarter and dollar slot machines will remain turned off as gambling is illegal.

The ship also will feature shops run by Dubai Duty Free, the government-run conglomerate that had $1.93 billion of sales in 2017, with 9.7 million cans of beer and 7.4 million bottles of liquor and wine sold.

Workers hurried across the ship Tuesday to finish up work ahead of the hotel’s soft opening Wednesday. By October, Mustafa said the hotel hopes to have a grand opening with “600 to 800 rooms” ready.

“If you want to come and have a sense of how it was during the ocean liner era but at the same time being a doorstep away from Dubai, this is the place you want to be,” he said. “We’re not a theme. We’re not a concept. This is what this ship was.”