DESERT FANTASIES - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 129

craft-of-the-day at the Kids Club, ping-pong, trampolines, a tennis academy, book reading
on the beach for small children and Dubai bus tours, plus shops, cafés and restaurants.
Also like the cruise ships, the staff here came from everywhere: Turkey, the Philippines,
the United States, Great Britain and India.
You could spend a week at the “Palazzo” of Atlantis and never leave the resort and
its 112 acres, which is the point. Ed Fuller, of Marriott, said that the all-inclusive resort,
“where guests spend most of their money in your hotel,” brought the greatest profits in the
hotel industry today.
All that seemed in jeopardy during the Great Recession when Dubai had to borrow bil-
lions from Abu Dhabi and experts were predicting the demise of the emirate, especially
its rise as a tourism haven. The prospects of Dubai defaulting again are high, in part be-
cause the terms of the loan and even the size are not public. Dubai's public debt is spread
out among various government-owned investment conglomerates, including the Nakheel
property firm, a subsidiary behind the Atlantis. No one knows whether the initial $10 bil-
lion bail-out was enough and whether the current recovery will be enough for Dubai to
repay an $18 billion principal that is due on its state-owned entities. (The question of sus-
tainability rests on Dubai's extravagant debt as well as its outrageous use of energy and its
environmental degradation.) The leaders assured their creditors that they could go back to
the basics, leaning even more heavily on tourism.
Yet the Atlantis Hotel is a success story, at least on the surface. Even though it opened
during the recession and caters to wealthy clients who might have lost a good chunk of
their portfolios, the hotel is in demand. During the 2010-11 Christmas and New Year's
celebrations, there wasn't an empty room. Why tourists from near and far wanted to spend
the holidays away from home in one of Atlantis's nearly 1,600 rooms can be answered by
that James Bond image.
Dubai has done such a good job nurturing its glamorous, brash, devil-may-care image
that the city made it into the latest James Bond novel, Carte Blanche , as the site of danger,
and of course lots of luxury products. The backdrop for the movie Sex and the City 2 was
Abu Dhabi, with Carrie and her friends cavorting in an imaginary desert city. (Abu Dh-
abi refused permission to film the licentious story in the emirate.) In Filipino and Indian
films Dubai is the Promised Land reachable by selling yourself out as a common laborer
and then hoping to either strike it rich or fall in love. The Dubai Studio City complex, the
Hollywood of the Gulf, attracts Middle Eastern, European, Asian and American television
and filmmakers who routinely use Dubai as a backdrop.
Those films feed tourism—just check the official website for tourism in Austria. Julie
Andrews and The Sound of Music are central to the “brand” of the country.
The appeal of Dubai stems in part from its location on the volatile edge of Middle
Eastern and Asian war zones. Each new conflict brings more tourists. Some are disguised
as soldiers. On our plane from Washington, we were surrounded by mercenaries or con-