Hotel Review: JA Ocean View Hotel, Dubai Marina

JA Ocean View Hotel

I’ve never actually done a hotel review before on the blog, so this is a first! We absolutely loved the hotel we picked for our stay in Dubai, so I thought I’d do a little review of it for anyone else looking for the best place to stay in Dubai! Yes, it was that amazing!

We booked 5 nights in a Standard Sea View room (bed and breakfast) for Sunday to Friday in the middle of October, the week before UK half term starts.

So, the JA Ocean View Hotel is a 4 star hotel and it definitely felt like that on arrival. We arrived at the hotel at around 2.30am on the Monday morning and were greeted with bellboys and friendly reception staff (and the smell in the hotel was amazing). We even got a nice cold flannel, mint lemonade and some cookies while we were checking in.

Above and Below Photo Source

Location

We both agreed that we couldn’t have booked a hotel in a better location for our trip! Everything we needed was literally on our doorstep! It’s located in Jumeirah Beach Residence in the Dubai Marina area, but at the far end heading towards Abu Dhabi. I was worried when we booked it that we wouldn’t be central in the Marina, but honestly this was perfect!

We had the stops for both of the hop-on-hop-off busses literally outside of our hotel. There was also a supermarket and pharmacy at the plaza around the corner which came in so handy for buying drinks!

It’s a 5 minute walk across the road to the beach, which is where you’ll find loads of restaurants ranging from The Cheesecake Factory to Ladurée. And the beginning of ‘The Walk’ is just opposite the hotel, so there’s plenty of shops like Muji and River Island there too!

For any activities, the Splash Boat tour embarkation point is a 10 minute walk just over the river behind the hotel and there’s also a few options for dinner along the Marina like Pier 7.

In terms of visiting the rest of Dubai, The Dubai Mall, Burj Khalifa and Dubai International Airport are about a 40 minute drive away, or there’s the metro if you want to use public transport. The Atlantis on The Palm and Mall of the Emirates were about 20 minutes away, so it is quite far out from the rest of Dubai, but it’s the same with any hotel in The Marina, though there’s plenty of public transport to get you around if you don’t fancy driving or using a taxi!

Rooms

The thing that I loved most about this hotel is that every single room has a sea view with a balcony! While a lot of the hotels in Dubai are 4-sided (looking out every direction depending on the room location), the JA Ocean View Hotel rooms literally only face out towards the sea, with a view over the pool and I loved that so much so you didn’t have to pay extra to book the sea-view rooms.

We had a standard room, and it was huge! We had a massive bed, sofa, TV, hairdryer, safe, robes & slippers, minibar (charges apply) air-con and free wifi (and the wifi speeds were amazing). The rooms were super clean throughout our stay and the cleaners were always so friendly as you passed them in the hallway.

The bed was super comfy, though I didn’t like the pillows (but Shane told me on the last day that there was the option to call housekeeping and select from 7 different pillows). The bathroom was clean and spacious and had loads of free toiletries too!

Facilities & Amenities

The hotel has so many facilities, but we barely used any! As we had breakfast included in our room fee, we only visited one of the 6 restaurants in the hotel, and the breakfast was great! There was a huge selection of pastries, fresh fruit, pancakes and cereal, along with a good selection of ham, salmon and salad options with some middle eastern foods thrown in like hummus and baba ganoush. And the hot food selection was great too with an omelet station, along with your usual beans, mushrooms, sausages and bacon etc.

There’s also a swimming pool which was a little chilly first thing in the morning but good for cooling off at the end of the day in, with a little kids pool too.

There’s also a spa, beauty salon, gym, kids club, laundry service, room service, and complimentary shuttle to the Old Town, Malls and some of the sister hotels in the area. You can also borrow a beach kit from the booth at the pool, which includes towels and a sunshade. Towels are also available at the pool area too. There’s also super fast free wifi in every area of the hotel.

The concierge was great, and we used them a few times – we booked our boat trip through them, and they were so helpful when I wanted to go to the Dubai Miracle Garden, but we weren’t sure if it was open yet, so they called for us (sadly it opened for the season 2 weeks after we left).

Overall Thoughts

We absolutely loved our stay at the JA Ocean View Hotel. It honestly had the most perfect location, the staff were amazing throughout the stay and couldn’t do enough to help you with anything. The cleaners would always ask how your day was as you were returning to your room and the whole hotel smelled so amazing!

It was a lot more expensive than our usual holiday accommodation at £700 for the 5 nights for 2 people (£350 each), but it was definitely worth it. Most of the other hotels in the area were around the same price range, some were obviously more expensive and didn’t even include a sea-view (and that was the big selling point for me).

You can find the JA Ocean View hotel on Booking.com here* (affiliate link)

I can honestly say that when we return to Dubai, we’ll be booking here again! Have you been to Dubai? Where did you stay?

* This post contains some affiliate links at no extra cost to you, but I do make a small amount of commission on any purchases.