On the 15th of March 1975, the late His Highness Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, had the great honour of inaugurating Dubai’s very first five-star hotel with a distinguished ribbon-cutting ceremony. Constructed at a cost of AED 70 million and designed by the renowned Neal Prince A.S.I.D., this iconic property set a new benchmark for luxury and hospitality in the region.
Now celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Radisson Blu Hotel Dubai Deira Creek—formerly known as the InterContinental Dubai—remains a proud symbol of the city’s pioneering spirit in hospitality, standing as a testament to Dubai’s visionary ambition in establishing world-class mixed-use hospitality spaces.
As home to 12 original food and beverage outlets, with some restaurants passing the 40-year operation landmark, including the legendary premium Persian eatery, Shabestan and The Pub, the property is also home to the renowned Fish Market, which enjoys unprecedented views across the creek and the Dhow Wharfage. The property opened with just three outlets, including Al Nakuda, a coffee shop, where you could get a cup of coffee or tea for just AED5.
Mixing it up
With the opening of the Plaza Building in 1980 the property realised space to expand the food and beverage offering, as well as creating some of Dubai’s earliest meeting and conference spaces, which have held everything from automotive launches, fashion shows, and theatre productions in the Plaza Ballroom which was the largest in town for the time. With its elevated position, the ballroom provides limitless views across the Dubai skyline only adding to the ambience.
Additional space for retail, made the hotel the first truly mixed-use development for its time, and innovations were clear and present in 1985, when IBM Computers won the contract to install the first computers for the front office team, enabling them to complete check-in and check-out procedures more efficiently. Milestones continued in the 90s when during its 20th anniversary year the hotel launched the city’s first 24-hour health club and introduced the concept of Friday brunch to the city in 1998.
Dubai’s original centre of everything
The Radisson Blu Hotel Dubai Deira Creek has played host to royalty, presidents, prime ministers, musical artists, sporting legends, actors and designers over the years, most notably, HM Queen Elizabeth II, who stayed at the hotel during her state visit in 1979. Former USSR President, Mikhail Gorbachev, the King & Queen of Nepal, former Polish President Aleksander Kwosniewski and former Prime Minister of Malaysia, Tun Abdullah Ahmed Badawi have also been guests at the hotel.
Additional luminaries have included Bryan Adams, Karim Abdul Jabbar, Paloma Picasso, Aishwarya Rai, Imran Khan and actress Liz Hurley, who made her first theatre appearance in the hotel. In 1979, the hotel played host to the British Dinner Theatre, the origins of Dubai cultural diversity offering.
With its location close to Dubai International Airport, it became popular for use by airlines for their crew and signed British Airways as its first client in 1976.
Over the next 12 months, the Radisson Blu Hotel Dubai Deira Creek will play host to an array of activities and celebrations designed to recognise their role in the nascent stages of Dubai’s tourism growth, their commitment to staff who’ve completed decades of service to guests, and to the wider community who have been coming to the hotel over the years, to the point where multi-generational families now host special occasions at the hotel.
Lahsen Saadaoui, Hotel Manager, said on the occasion: “It’s an honour to be able to celebrate this historic hotel, and recognise all that it has achieved over the past five decades. We hope that the wider Dubai community will come and visit us, to get a better understanding of the city’s past, and our role in that, while helping to celebrate this significant milestone.”
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