Nine Restaurants and a Working Dock: InterContinental Abu Dhabi by IHG
A private dock and its moorings sit on the water beside the InterContinental Abu Dhabi, and the restaurants of Marina Walk run along the quay next to them. Very few hotels in the capital open directly onto their own working berths, and the marina is the first thing this property shows you.
Behind it stands a tower of nineteen floors holding 390 rooms, with a private beach, an outdoor infinity pool, a splash pool with a slide for children and nine restaurants. The hotel has held this stretch of the Al Bateen shore for decades, and a considerable share of Abu Dhabi’s social history has taken place inside it.
The Al Bateen shoreline
The address is King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Street, on the western shore of the main island, roughly fifteen minutes on foot from Etihad Towers and a short drive from Emirates Palace, Qasr Al Watan and the Corniche.
Zayed International Airport is about 37 kilometres away. Madinat Zayed Shopping Centre is around ten kilometres, the Louvre Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi Mall roughly fifteen. Al Bateen Executive Airport and the government quarter are both close, which accounts for a good deal of the corporate following.
The grounds are mature in a way that only decades of watering can produce, and on an island where most hotel landscaping is younger than the buildings around it, that is not a small asset.
Three hundred and ninety rooms across nineteen floors
Accommodation opens with Classic Rooms of around forty one square metres and rises through One Bedroom Suites to the Emirates Suite, the Royal Suite and the Presidential Suite.
The sea facing categories look out over the marina and the Gulf beyond it. Garden view rooms face the grounds. Every room carries a pillow menu, premium bedding and a desk sized properly for a laptop.
Club InterContinental occupies the eighteenth floor and adds lounge access together with a private meeting room, which suits a guest working in the government districts who has no wish to book a conference suite to hold a conversation.
Four of the 390 rooms are accessible. Check in runs from three in the afternoon and check out at midday, and the hotel applies a minimum check in age of twenty one.
Nine kitchens, and why residents book them
The dining is the reason a great many Abu Dhabi residents come here without staying the night.
Chamas Churrascaria and Bar is the Brazilian grill, carving at the table. Byblos Sur Mer handles Lebanese cooking on the water. Fishmarket is the seafood room, where guests choose from the ice and the kitchen cooks to order. Cho Gao covers pan Asian, Porto Gina works in Italian, and the Belgian Café is exactly what its name promises.
Bars sit alongside them, including poolside service and a swim up bar. Marina Walk is the name for the run of terraces along the quay, and six of the nine venues sit on it. That arrangement matters more than a list of cuisines. It means a guest can eat Lebanese one evening, Brazilian the next and Italian the third without leaving the water’s edge, and it explains why these tables fill with residents of the city rather than only with the people sleeping upstairs.
> Fishmarket runs on a simple premise executed properly. Choose the fish, say how you want it cooked, wait. In a city crowded with concepts, the absence of one is refreshing.
Water, sand and a gym that never closes
Two outdoor pools serve the property, one of them an infinity pool, alongside a children’s splash pool with a slide, a separate plunge pool and a hot tub. The private beach carries chairs, umbrellas, cabanas, towel service and volleyball.
Counting the two pools, the plunge pool, the hot tub and the splash pool, there are five separate bodies of water on the property, which is the reason swimmers and families here rarely have to negotiate with one another for space.
The spa offers a treatment menu with sauna, steam and a hot tub. The fitness centre runs around the clock and is equipped with treadmills, rowers, stair steppers, stationary bicycles, elliptical machines and free weights, with a cold plunge and a whirlpool attached. An aerobics instructor and a sports trainer are on site. Two outdoor tennis courts and squash complete the sporting provision, which is generous by the standards of a city hotel.
Children, and colleagues
A children’s pool, a slide, an activities programme and babysitting make this a straightforwardly family capable address, and connecting rooms are widely available.
For business, the meeting facilities are substantial, and the eighteenth floor club lounge gives a smaller party somewhere to work without hiring a room. Proximity to Al Bateen Executive Airport and to the ministries does the rest, and a delegation can be wheels down and at a table here inside half an hour.
Among its neighbours
Within this stretch of the capital the comparison worth making is with the marina properties a little further along the same shore. The Abu Dhabi EDITION holds 198 rooms and 57 residences in a pared back idiom, and Royal M by Gewan is an independent of six room categories. The InterContinental runs to 390 rooms over nineteen floors with nine restaurants, a private beach and its own dock.
That is a different proposition. A guest who wants design and quiet will be happier on the marina. A guest who wants a full resort operation with a choice of nine kitchens and sand at the door will find it here, and will pay less per square metre of provision than either neighbour asks.
In practice
Ask for a sea facing room over the marina, book Fishmarket rather than the obvious choice, and use the beach in the morning before the pools fill. The Marina Walk terraces come into their own after sunset, when the boats are lit and the temperature on the quay drops by several degrees, and the sports trainer can be booked for an hour on the tennis courts before the heat arrives.
Contact
HOTEL: InterContinental Abu Dhabi by IHG
ADDRESS: King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud Street, Al Bateen W33, Abu Dhabi
TELEPHONE: +971 2 666 6888
EMAIL: intercontinental.abudhabi@ihg.com
WEBSITE: https://www.ihg.com/intercontinental/hotels/us/en/abu-dhabi/auhha/hoteldetail
AREA: Al Bateen