Dubai Shopping & Sightseeing | Mall of Emirates & Ski Dubai

We visited during the Dubai Shopping Festival in January and Holiday Vibez had planned everything around the festival schedule. The Gold Souk on Day 1 — my wife had researched gold rates and designs for weeks. She found exactly what she wanted at 12% below the Chennai retail price for the same 22K design, after 40 minutes of patient looking and gentle bargaining. She was thrilled. Ski Dubai on Day 3 was the biggest surprise — stepping from 35°C sunshine into the ski slope at -2°C, the snow under our feet, the chair lift above us, actual ski runs — in Dubai. My children (10 and 13) screamed with joy on the toboggan run. Global Village on Day 4 with all the DSF fireworks happening simultaneously — extraordinary. This is the best shopping trip we’ve ever done anywhere. Holiday Vibez: no problem, no delay, no queue anywhere.

Six of us — three married couples — came specifically for the shopping. Dubai Mall is incomprehensible in scale. We arrived thinking we would finish in 2 hours and spent the entire day. The Burj Khalifa queue at sunset — we had skip-the-line tickets from Holiday Vibez and walked past a 200-person queue directly to the elevator — worth every rupee. The Dubai Fountain show at night with the Burj Khalifa lit above it — the most spectacular sight any of us had seen in a city. Ski Dubai: two of our group had never seen snow before in their lives. Standing in the snow, inside a mall, in Dubai, with ski slopes above us — one of them stood completely still for 5 minutes and could not speak. Global Village with the 90 country pavilions was extraordinary value — we bought Turkish ceramics, Moroccan lamps, and Thai silk. Excellent package and exceptional team at Holiday Vibez.

My wife bought more gold in the Gold Souk in 90 minutes than she had bought in the previous 5 years in India. The quality, the variety, the prices — her jeweller friends in Madurai told her she had paid about 11% below Indian prices for the same 22K purity. She is still talking about it. The Dubai Fountain was something I want to show everyone I know — the scale of it, the music, the water jets 15 floors high, the Burj Khalifa glowing behind it reflected in the lake below. My teenage daughter spent 3 hours at the Dubai Mall Fashion Avenue trying on clothes she would never buy. She was happy. Ski Dubai for her was the highlight — she had never seen snow and kept picking it up and staring at it in disbelief. Dubai is an extraordinary place and Holiday Vibez made every moment easy.