Great hotel for a relaxing holiday

Written: 10 september 2019
Travel time: 17 — 24 august 2019
Who does the author recommend the hotel to?: For a relaxing holiday; For business travel; For families with children
Your rating of this hotel:
10.0
from 10
Hotel ratings by criteria:
Rooms: 10.0
Service: 10.0
Cleanliness: 10.0
Food: 10.0
Amenities: 8.0
How much do you know about Qatar? Until recently, the country was not particularly welcoming to our tourists. Now, with the introduction of a visa-free regime a couple of years ago, interest in this direction is gaining momentum, especially in view of the fact that in 2022 this is where the World Cup will be held.

Package offer of operator Join Up. A flight on the excellent Qatar Airways, the best airline in the world, impressed with the quality of the Airbus 320 boards, service, food and punctuality. The downside for group bookings is the impossibility of online check-in, but on the other hand, thanks to this, 3 seats were provided at the airport check-in, and even the 8th row right behind the business, with extra legroom, retractable monitors. It's better to try once, and even better not just one ...Fingerprints at passport control, the purpose of the visit - a couple of moments and visa-free stamps in three passports.

The host company Discover Qatar, according to the standard, meets in the arrivals hall with a sign, distribution by car within 10-15 minutes, but they only make individual transfers (it will be clear why later) and in full comfort in half an hour they were already at their beach hotel Intercontinental beach 5 * . When choosing a hotel for a vacation, another Intercontinental city option was considered with breakfast + dinner for almost the same price as a beach one for breakfast, but since it’s just a sin to sit in a hotel in the evening, and during the day you need a beach and a pool, the choice was made on Intercontinental beach 5 * . A hotel with the longest beach strip in Doha, about one kilometer, a fairly extensive green area with a thoughtful location and everything you need. Therefore, not even St. Regis is pretentious, albeit at the same price as our neighbor Interconti.

At the moment, the hotel is undergoing a partial renovation of the rooms, the facade and the main entrance, and possibly the main reception, because.
now there is a small reception desk closer to the right wing of the hotel, in which, in fact, they settled. Superior city view category in the middle part of the fourth floor with a view of 40% of the city and the sea, and 60% of the city desert, covering half of the panoramic window with a curtain you get a beautiful view of the sea))) There are no balconies in superior and deluxe rooms, only in club rooms. The room itself is more than 40 square meters with a king bed, distribution to the sleeping area and the work area, where a sofa with a table and a full-fledged work desk with an armchair are separately allocated. Safe for free, mini bar refrigerator for a fee, the presence of a board and iron for ironing.

In the room there is a set for making tea and coffee with daily replenishment of water (liter per person per day), tea and capsules for the coffee machine. Also daily treated with fruit, as in the photo. Superficial cleaning daily, along with a change of towels. Excellent cosmetics with lemon aroma.
The bathroom is more than decent, a bathtub and a shower, a long washbasin such that two can be accommodated for greater convenience. An unpleasant aftertaste left the fact that on two weekdays, when the hotel was at its minimum, there was no hot water for half a day. The reception culturally answered that in the near future we would send a brigade for repairs, etc. they were playing for time and miraculously appeared clearly at 6 pm. Clearly, scheduled repairs were being carried out, since the noise from the rest of the work could be heard already starting at 7 in the morning, somewhere far away, not loud, but still.


The air conditioner worked with a bang, both in the room and throughout the hotel, and in the room the touch control of the air conditioner and the control of the "status" of the room pressed the button - ordered cleaning. Wi-fi without restrictions, even on the beach. Exit to him through the beach club zone, which captures the guests living in the hotel and those who come for a day for money.
Towels are given as much as needed, as well as chilled water, there is also a small children's room and a gym at the exit. Immediately upon exiting the building there is a large zoned pool with a bar. The beds are excellent, clean, moderately soft. A set of four sun loungers under one umbrella, which is difficult to call an umbrella - a whole shadow maker. Nearby is a children's pool with a half-meter depth and an awning.

In the summer, when the water is warmer than the air in the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf and you feel like in a sauna, it is very difficult to withstand more than an hour in a not very early morning, the pool was an outlet. Moreover, an adult is just coolly pleasant, but a real paradise for children, just an oasis of circulating coolness. For a couple of days, there was no one in it except for me and the Kinder, and when local families began to appear closer to the weekend, it began to seem that they were climbing right into your bathroom)) but it became more fun.
Immediately behind the children's pool is a children's playground: under an awning, clean sand throughout, several slides and labyrinths, for an hourly change of scenery is quite. And a little further a lawn for mini football. From the side of the residence there are 2 hard courts. The beach is impeccable, sand is smoothed every morning, sunbeds to sunbeds and vacationers are dispersed along the entire length of the beach.

Now separately on nutrition. The main buffet restaurant Coral is open for breakfast from 6 am to 11 am, lunch and dinner. Breakfasts are excellent, to each his own taste. Daily 2 types of bacon, 2 types of sausages, omelettes on order and scrambled eggs, baked tomatoes and potatoes, various cereals, milk. Separately, a table with cheeses, could not resist taking pictures, especially delicious little heads of cheese in a red individual wax shell.

Landing in the restaurant hall is accompanied by employees who offer a table from the mass of free ones, and you can easily choose in the dialogue.

The waiters immediately offer coffee and juices, the choice of five types of fresh juices pleased every morning (as in the photo): orange, mango, carrot, pineapple and the most delicious watermelon. Yes, and this is in the presence of a mass of fruit. Fresh pastries, Belgian waffles with black and white chocolate. Vegetables and salads in abundance, mackerel in two positions, salmon. And every morning they added some kind of zest, as I called them khinkali with seafood (super green bags), fried shrimp, chicken rolls, etc. We went to the colorful and cozy Mykonos restaurant for lunch almost every day.
On weekdays, their business lunch for 99 QAR was great for a snack, three dishes for three were enough for a snack, which was very surprising because the price of water was 25 QAR for one and a half liters, they took it once, but then somehow I didn’t want to spend $ 8 in the presence of free at hand in the beach club.

One day we tried a seafood basket for 170 QAR - very worthy, satisfying and water as a bonus)) One of the evenings we decided to try dinner at the hotel, to take a break from the evening running around the city. The cost of dinner on weekdays is 195 QAR per adult, children under 6 years old are free, up to 12 years old - 50% discount, on weekends, depending on the topic, 250-350 QAR. So here are the dinners. Meat of all kinds, fish, steaks, kare with serving, pasta & pizza station, sushi show, shrimp and squid along with side dishes. Vegetables, fruits, cheeses duplicating the morning. Handmade cakes, delicious. A large bottle of water is complimentary. The restaurants have excellent service.
But you can’t eat like that every evening, in fact, that’s not why you came here ...Therefore, as planned, everyone else spent outside the hotel.


Thanks to the metro, we can say that there is public transport, the subway stop is 300 meters from the hotel. For the sake of interest, we drove RT once. The cost of a single ticket is 2 QAR for use within 3 hours. The stations are still being built, but the open ones are cooler, there are several employees for each passenger who will help you buy a ticket and lead you into the car (there are family ones, there are men's and gold ones). An ordinary family carriage, even with children's seats, everything is new, neat, they are trying very hard by 2022. And so everywhere taxis, and even better Uber.
From the hotel to the city center to the Gate mall or City center mall, the cost is 11 QAR, and through the whole city to Villagio mall (the city of Venice is under the roof, gondolas carry tourists along the canal, a sightseeing bus, a boutique wing, 2 ice arenas, food courts and a gaming center - all under one roof with a grocery megamarket) - 25 QAR or about 150 UAH. for a half hour trip. That is why airport transfers are individual, cheap and comfortable.

The best and obligatory place for walking is the cultural village, 5 minutes drive from the hotel, where all sorts of interesting things are collected. Narrow streets decorated with lanterns, a monument to the Koran, an imitation of the solar system, colored musical fountains. And what about the area between the boutique centers, where air conditioning blows from the sewer grate on the street. Also, you can’t go through the myo park Green hill park, greenery in all forms, and this is at their temperature.
Souq Waqif is essentially a typical Arab market, but it has its own charm, it is worth visiting along with the falcon and camel markets, but the Corniche frankly disappointed. We had dinner at various mid-level establishments, of which I would especially single out Vapiano at the Gate mall (I already wanted to try ours in Kyiv and Lviv, they wouldn’t disappoint), the Italian restaurant Vezuvio is expensive and tasteless, Al Bisana is an absolutely local institution with local cuisine, hookahs , the pricing policy is not high, tasty and colorful.


By the way, the hotel has a concierge service, from which you can sign up for organized trips to the malls and the city for free. When checking in, they ask either a credit card or ask to leave a deposit. At the same time, the deposit in dollars is packed in an envelope and remains a deposit in dollars until the eviction. When checking out, they print it out, exchange it for reals and make a calculation. That is, change in dollars or pay extra how much you worked up during your vacation.
We left a deposit of $300 for a week's stay, for lunch and dinner, as a result, a little more than $200 and paid. It is important to pay attention, everywhere they warn you a million times, but I specifically decided to check - dollars older than 2009 are not taken under any pretext, stock up on fresh ones or credit cards. They change dollars at the hotel at the rate of 3.5 with the official 3.65, quite acceptable.

The hotel is worthy from all sides and I can safely recommend it for a relaxing family holiday.

They didn’t get out on the excursion because they were on vacation with a three-year-old child, the main indicator of which was his words with a request: “Parents, let’s buy an apartment here” ?? ?
Translated automatically from Russian. View original