The three night stay in a hotel in Dubai and a 7 night cruise 02/02/2017 - 13/02/2017.

The plan was to stay for 3 nights at the Atlantis The Palm,then join the Vision of the Seas for a cruise in the Gulf.Only the travel agency did not reserve me a room at the Atlantis,the hotel was full of Chinese guests,celebrating the Chinese New Year.After seven hours of flying and having been told by the agency's woman representative, that it was not her job to"look for missing rooms", after making numerous phone calls to England,at 3 in the afternoon I finally entered a room 4045 of my new hotel The One And Only The Mirage,some 30 minutes by taxi from the Atlantis. Mistakes do happen. The most deplorable thing was the way the rectifying of the mistake was handled. At The Atlantis,this rich five star hotel where I had to sit in the lobby and wait for five hours, not once had any-one come to me to offer a glass of water or a cup of coffee. Not once. And when I asked a girl at the reception if they would allow me to connect to the internet [I needed the password] so that I could e-mail England,as I had used up all my credit phoning, I was told - no, you are not a guest here. That was the most disgraceful thing for a hotel to do.Utterly despicable and heartless. The room at The One And Only,The Mirage was beautiful,the hotel excellent,the service second to none,breakfast one of the best I have ever had in a five star hotel [the other two being at the Bauer in Venice and Thermia Palace in Piestany, a spa town in Slovakia].But the position of the hotel was such,that to go anywhere one had to take a taxi.You did not see any-one walking outside in the street.There was nowhere to walk,nothing to see in the neighbourhood. The private beach was short and full of rocks and stones.You could not walk on it barefoot.There is a massive building for parking, adjacent to the hotel,it quite spoiled the view,next to it a rail track, a train passed by several times an hour. The Atlantis has 8 km of private beach,it is a massive resort [the first ever built in Dubai,opened in 2008] with endless possibilities for activity and walking.This is where I had imagined spending 3 days in Dubai.And this is what I did not get.