We had a party of 12 family members cruising the ‘Cities of Gold’ end of January / start of February. This included Dubai; Bahrain; Oman (Muscat and Khasab); Abu Dhabi and back to Dubai (with an overnight stay).

We flew from Manchester on a 767 – comfortable overnight flight of just under 8 hours. When we checked in at Manchester there was a desk for cruise passengers providing luggage labels for cases and instructions confirming that we DID have to collect our cases from the carousel on arrival and transfer them to the coach. Would have been nice if they were transferred directly – but no big issues, and it was all made very clear.

We flew to Dubai - Al Maktoum airport – which is about an hour outside of Dubai. Although the airport is brand new and state of the art, it still took 1.5 hours from landing to getting our cases. After loading cases to the coach the next we saw of them was when they were delivered to our cabins. This was really smooth – only about an hour after boarding. Read more