Twenty Seven Holes and a Table at Sacci: VOGO Abu Dhabi Golf Resort and Spa

Sacci is the Italian kitchen here, and it gives the clearest sense of what this resort now intends. It sits within a programme the property lists at ten restaurants and bars, which is a substantial count for a hotel of 172 rooms and a sign that the kitchens are expected to feed more than the guest list.

Alongside it, Fairways looks straight out over the course, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner with alfresco seating and a menu that leans Italian and Mediterranean after dark. A bar, a lounge and a poolside bar sit around them, and the golf clubhouse adds dining of its own a short walk away.

Breakfast on the terrace, taken early with the course still wet and the first groups going out, is the meal that guests here talk about afterwards.

Twenty seven holes, and a falcon on the skyline

Abu Dhabi Golf Club has been the emirate’s championship venue for years, and its clubhouse, shaped like a falcon with its wings spread, is visible from the road long before the turning appears.

Twenty seven holes run through the site. The championship course accounts for eighteen of them and is floodlit for night golf, which in a country where afternoon temperatures decide the day is a more useful provision than it sounds. The practice range is equipped with TrackMan, and lessons are available for guests who arrive with more ambition than technique.

The resort is wrapped around all of this rather than placed beside it, and the golf view room categories look directly onto the fairways.

The name above the door

The resort spent years operating under an international brand and now trades independently as VOGO. The building, the course and the clubhouse are unchanged. What has changed is the name on the paperwork.

This is worth stating plainly because a good deal of published material still carries the former brand, and a guest comparing listings will find the property described under two names in the same search. Anyone booking on the strength of a specific facility should confirm it directly with the resort rather than relying on older pages.

One hundred and seventy two rooms

The property holds 172 rooms and suites in a single building, which gives it an intimacy the four hundred room mainland hotels cannot reproduce.

By comparison, the larger mainland hotels run to four hundred rooms and the creek side resorts beyond five hundred, and the difference shows at breakfast, where a single terrace here absorbs most of the house at once.

Junior suites run to around forty five square metres with golf views, furnished patios and dining tables. Deluxe twin rooms carry two queen beds, a balcony and the same outlook over the course. Premium categories and a presidential suite sit above them.

Every room carries down duvets, premium bedding, a pillow menu and hypoallergenic options on request, with separate bathtubs and rainfall showers, bathrobes, slippers and designer toiletries. It is a specification pitched at guests who will be up at first light and want the room to compensate.

> The golf view categories look straight down the fairways, and in the hour before the heat arrives they are the reason to be here rather than anywhere else on the mainland.

Two pools and six treatment rooms

Two outdoor pools serve the resort, with complimentary cabanas, loungers and umbrellas, a poolside bar and a children’s pool alongside.

The spa runs six treatment rooms, among them rooms for couples, offering deep tissue massage, facials, body wraps and scrubs, with a steam room attached. It is a sensible size for a property of this room count, large enough to take a golfing group on the same afternoon without turning anybody away. The fitness centre operates around the clock.

Eleven event spaces, thirteen minutes to the terminal

The resort lists eleven event spaces, the Masters Ballroom among them, supported by a business centre running around the clock. Eleven rooms of varying size allow a conference to hold its plenary and its breakout sessions in the same building, and the clubhouse across the grass takes the dinner that follows.

Abu Dhabi International Airport is thirteen minutes away, which makes this a genuine option for a conference flown in and out over two days. Ferrari World and Yas Island are around thirteen minutes, and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and Zayed Sports City Stadium are both close. The main island is a straightforward drive, although this is a resort that expects its guests to stay put.

Children stay free and cots are complimentary, which together with the children’s pool makes the property workable for a family, even though the guest base is dominated by golfers.

Choosing between the mainland resorts

The mainland offers three quite different propositions and the numbers separate them. The hotel at Al Forsan International Sports Resort holds 400 rooms across five floors, eleven minutes from the terminal, with cable wakeboarding and an equestrian centre on its own site. Millennium Al Rawdah sits inland beside the exhibition centre with four pools and eight meeting rooms.

VOGO is the smallest of the three at 172 rooms and the only one built around a championship course. That is the entire case for it. A guest whose trip is organised around tee times gets a golf view room, a range with TrackMan and a first tee a few minutes from the door, and gives up the beach that none of the mainland hotels has anyway.

Booking it

Take a golf view junior suite, book the first tee time of the day and eat on the terrace afterwards. Ask about night golf if the visit falls in the warmer months, and confirm current facilities with the resort directly given how recent the change of name is.

Contact

HOTEL: VOGO Abu Dhabi Golf Resort & Spa
ADDRESS: Abu Dhabi Golf Club, Sas Al Nakhl SW17, Abu Dhabi
TELEPHONE: +971 2 616 9999
EMAIL: info.abudhabi@vogohotels.com
WEBSITE: https://www.vogohotels.com/
AREA: Sas Al Nakhl / Khalifa City