With its winding pathways, Nubian-inspired architecture, and uninterrupted views across the Arabian Gulf, The Cove Rotana Resort Ras Al Khaimah feels worlds away from the everyday. Framed by desert hills and a 600-metre private beach, the village-style retreat invites guests to slow down, whether that means lingering over a Mediterranean brunch at Basilico, retreating to a private pool villa, stretching a midweek escape into 36 unhurried hours by the coast, or raising a glass with all-day Happy Hour at Basilico and Breeze. This August, every moment is designed to be savoured at a gentler pace, surrounded by the timeless beauty of Ras Al Khaimah’s coastline.

Coastal Brunch at Basilico
Saturdays at Basilico invite guests to settle into the weekend with the Coastal Brunch, where Mediterranean flavours, live entertainment, and relaxed waterfront dining come together in an elegant setting. The generous spread features live oyster and sushi stations, poached crab and shrimp, a mozzarella and burrata bar, Arabic mezze, freshly prepared pasta, carving stations, and an indulgent selection of desserts, all complemented by live performances from a duo band.

Guests are also invited to make a day of it with complimentary access to the resort’s pool and private beach, extending the experience beyond the table and into a leisurely afternoon by the water.

When: Every Saturday, 1pm – 4pm. | Price: AED 249 per person (soft beverages); AED 339 per person (house beverages).

Basilico Sunday Roast
Gather with family and friends for a leisurely Sunday Roast at Basilico, where Sundays at The Cove Rotana Resort are best enjoyed with a traditional roast and uninterrupted views across the Arabian Gulf. Available every Sunday from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm, the menu features a classic roast with all the trimmings, accompanied by hearty sides, rich gravies, and a comforting dessert to finish.

Priced at AED 99 per person, it’s an inviting way to bring the weekend to a close, with good food, sea views, and the resort’s relaxed atmosphere setting the tone for an unhurried afternoon.

When: Every Sunday, noon – 6pm. | Price: AED 99 per person.

All-Day Happy Hour at Basilico and Breeze

This August, enjoy an all-day Happy Hour at two of The Cove Rotana Resort’s dining destinations, Basilico and Breeze. Available on weekdays, the offer invites guests to unwind over a long lunch, an afternoon catch-up, or sunset drinks while enjoying selected beverages at exclusive rates in two distinct waterfront settings. When: Mondays to Thursdays, all day.

Private Pool Villa Summer Special
Slow the pace of summer with a secluded stay in one of The Cove Rotana Resort Ras Al Khaimah’s Private Pool Villas, where sun-soaked days unfold in the resort’s charming village-inspired surroundings. Designed for couples, families, and solo travellers alike, the Summer Special invites guests to embrace unhurried moments, from breakfast floating in the pool to relaxed evenings spent dining under the stars.

From AED 1,199 per room, per night, the package includes a floating breakfast and floating afternoon tea served in your private villa, an à la carte dinner at Basilico, a complimentary minibar on arrival,. Guests can also enjoy an exclusive in-villa dining menu throughout their stay, with the option to elevate the evening with a private BBQ on the villa terrace for an additional charge, while children under 12 stay and dine free.

When: Valid until 30 September 2026. | Price: From AED 1,199 per room per night on a half-board basis for two adults, with complimentary stay and dining for children below 12 years of age, and complimentary minibar upon arrival. Upgrade to a two-bedroom villa for an additional AED 500 per night or upgrade to a three-bedroom villa for an additional AED 1,250 per night. Terms and conditions apply.

36-Hour Weekday Getaway
Make the most of summer with an extended coastal stay at The Cove Rotana Resort Ras Al Khaimah, where extra time means unhurried mornings, afternoons by the pool or beach, and relaxed evenings overlooking the Arabian Gulf. Available from Sunday to Thursday, the offer includes early check-in from 9:00 am and late check-out until 9:00 pm, giving guests up to 36 hours to settle into the resort’s tranquil surroundings.

Rates start from AED 355 per room, per night, including breakfast for two adults, with flexible dining options to choose from, including breakfast, half board, and full board packages. Families are warmly welcomed, with up to two children under 12 staying free. Guests booking three nights or more will also enjoy a complimentary room upgrade, subject to availability.

When: Valid Sundays to Thursdays until 30 September 2026. | Price: From AED 355 per room, per night for two adults and two children with breakfast. Terms and conditions apply.

Pool and Beach Day Pass
Sun-drenched days and uninterrupted views of the Arabian Gulf set the scene for a relaxing day out at The Cove Rotana Resort Ras Al Khaimah. Available daily from 9:00 am until sunset, the Pool and Beach Day Pass includes access to the resort’s private beach, swimming pools, and Aqua Fun Waterslide, offering everything needed for an easy-going day by the water.

The pass also includes a fully redeemable food and beverage credit, allowing guests to enjoy a leisurely lunch, refreshing drinks, or light bites at one of the resort’s restaurants before returning to the pool or beach.

When: Daily, 9am – sunset. | Price: Weekdays: AED 125 per adult; AED 62.50 per child (6 to 12 years); free for children under 6 years of age. Weekends: AED 225 per adult; AED 112.50 per child (6 to 12 years); free for children under 6 years of age. Entrance fee fully redeemable against F&B.

As UAE residents look ahead to the Prophet Muhammad’s (PBUH) Birthday long weekend from 28–30 August, one of the year’s easiest international escapes is just four hours away. Sun Siyam is inviting travellers to make the most of the three-day break with two distinct Maldives experiences. Families looking for space, activities and plenty of choice can retreat to Sun Siyam Iru Fushi in the Noonu Atoll, while couples seeking a more intimate, slower-paced island experience can escape to Sun Siyam Vilu Reef in the South Nilandhe Atoll.

Direct connections to Malé are available with Emirates and flydubai from Dubai, Etihad Airways from Abu Dhabi, and Air Arabia from Sharjah, with fares starting from around AED 1,500 one-way from Dubai and return fares from Sharjah currently available from approximately AED 1,650 per person, subject to availability.

Whichever style of escape travellers choose, Sun Siyam makes a short Maldives break easy to plan, with 24-hour All-Inclusive experiences and packages combining accommodation, return transfers, dining and added experiences. Depending on the resort, these range from full dine-around dining and premium beverages to complimentary excursions, spa experiences and floating breakfasts, allowing guests to spend less of their long weekend planning and more of it enjoying the island. Families can also benefit from Kids Stay, Eat & Play Free for up to two children sharing with their parents, making the Maldives equally suited to a spontaneous couples’ getaway or a multi-generational family long weekend.

Sun Siyam Iru Fushi – A curated Island Sanctuary

Set in the Noonu Atoll, Sun Siyam Iru Fushi is part of Sun Siyam’s Luxury Collection, combining generous space, privacy and extensive dining and leisure experiences. Particularly suited to families and multi-generational groups, the resort offers spacious beach and overwater villas, including private pool options, alongside plenty of room for families to spend time together while still enjoying their own space. The resort’s extensive choice of restaurants and café, wellness experiences, water sports and activities means a short break can be tailored around every member of the family. Its 24-hour Premium All-Inclusive experience adds to the ease of a long-weekend stay, with full dine-around options, premium beverage selections, while children can stay, eat and play free when sharing with their parents.

For the August long weekend, a three-night package at Sun Siyam Iru Fushi starts from USD 3,337 (approximately AED 12,255) for two adults, including 24-hour Premium All-Inclusive, return seaplane transfers and a complimentary villa upgrade. Service charge, applicable taxes and Green Tax are also included in the package price.

Sun Siyam Vilu Reef- A Timeless Island Escape

For couples looking to leave the pace of the city behind, Sun Siyam Vilu Reef, part of Sun Siyam’s Privé Collection offers a romantic boutique island retreat in the South Nilandhe Atoll. Intimate, unhurried and surrounded by an iridescent house reef, the resort brings together the seclusion of a private island with the warmth and character of a distinctly Maldivian experience. Days can move effortlessly between snorkelling the house reef, spa rituals, dolphin cruises and quiet hours beside the lagoon, while six dining venues offer flavours from around the world. The resort’s 24-hour All-Inclusive experience makes a short stay particularly effortless, allowing couples to spend less time planning and more time enjoying the island.

For the long weekend, a three-night package at Sun Siyam Vilu Reef starts from USD 2,959 (approximately AED 10,867) for two adults, including 24-hour All-Inclusive, return seaplane transfers and a romantic set dinner. Service charge, applicable taxes and Green Tax are included.

Guests can book their August long weekend escape directly through Sun Siyam, with the latest packages, availability and offers available at sunsiyam.com/offers or book@sunsiyam.com

Sometimes the best holidays are the ones you did not plan months in advance. With the Maldives only four hours away, the August long weekend is enough time to disconnect completely and return home feeling as though you’ve been away for a week.

Exclusive interview with Jai Sharma, Founder, Envelop Designs Arabia 

Envelop has worked with major hospitality names including Taj Hotels, Rambagh Palace, Fairmont Udaipur, Ananta Hotels & Resorts and Emaar. What does a hotel or hospitality brand typically come to you wanting, and how does that differ from what a private client wants?

The starting point is actually the same, we begin with the story. Before we think about the space or the visual language, we want to understand who we’re designing for, their personalities, their values, what makes them different from everyone else in the room.

With a private client, that story is personal, a couple’s journey, their relationship, their families. With a hospitality brand, the story belongs to the property itself, its history, its guests, what it wants to be remembered for. The questions we ask change, but the process doesn’t. We’re still uncovering the emotional core before a single design decision gets made.

Hospitality brands are increasingly investing in “experience” as a differentiator rather than just service or amenities. From where you sit, is that a genuine shift in the industry or more of a marketing trend?

I’d call it a genuine shift, and it mirrors what we’ve seen happen with weddings over the last decade. The biggest change has been from display to meaning. Earlier, everything was about grandeur, now it’s increasingly about intention. Guests want experiences that reflect a place’s personality and values, not just its amenities.

The common thread across hospitality, weddings and brand experiences is emotional storytelling. People remember how something made them feel far longer than they remember what it looked like. We call it the memory economy, and hotels are starting to design for it the same way we’ve always designed celebrations, around recall, not just service.

You’ve now partnered with Rayqube to launch Envelop Designs Arabia in the UAE. What made Rayqube the right partner, and what does the division of expertise look like between design and technology in that partnership?

Rayqube brings nearly a decade of expertise in events, exhibition build-outs and technology-driven experiences, and that’s exactly the layer we needed to build properly in this market. Our strength has always been narrative, understanding a story and translating it into a spatial and experiential journey. Rayqube’s strength is production and technology, the infrastructure that makes ambitious ideas actually executable at scale.

Bringing that philosophy into the UAE through Envelop Designs Arabia let us build for a market that’s hungry for experiences with real cultural depth, and Rayqube is the right partner to help us do that. Design and technology under one roof means we’re not compromising on either side.

Hospitality operators think in terms of repeat guests and brand loyalty, not just single events. How do you design an experience that serves that longer-term relationship rather than just the moment itself?

A single celebration has one goal, to be remembered by the people in the room that night. A hospitality brand needs something that keeps working long after the guests have left, that makes them want to come back, or tell someone else about it.

What we’ve found is that the two aren’t actually in conflict. If an experience is built around genuine narrative rather than spectacle, it tends to create exactly the kind of memory that brings people back. We’re not designing for one night when we work with a hotel group, we’re designing for how that property wants to be felt every time someone walks through it.

The UAE hospitality and events market is famously competitive at the luxury end. What gap did you see here that made you confident there was still room for a studio built around narrative rather than décor?

We didn’t come to the UAE because it was the obvious next step. We came because I believe this region understands what it means to design a moment rather than just produce an event. There’s a real appetite here for depth, for culture, for experiences that are felt rather than simply seen.

Much of the region’s industry has been built around production and décor, and it’s genuinely excellent at that. What we saw was a different question waiting to be asked, not what a space should look like, but how it should make guests feel, treating every project as a complete sensory experience and reading psychology, pacing and emotion as real materials of design, alongside light, sound and space.

You’ve said Envelop deliberately limits itself to seven or eight social projects a year. Does that same discipline apply to hospitality partnerships, or does a longer-term brand relationship with a hotel group work differently from a single wedding or celebration?

The discipline is the same, even if the shape of the relationship is different. A hospitality partnership isn’t one project, it’s an ongoing one, so the depth we’d normally put into a single celebration gets spread across a longer relationship instead. That actually suits us. We’re not interested in taking on every hotel group that approaches us, we’re interested in the ones where there’s real alignment on what an experience should be.

The seven or eight number applies specifically to social projects, but the underlying principle, depth over volume, is what governs every relationship we take on, hospitality included.

With Envelop Designs Arabia, you’ve mentioned engaging in early conversations around Dubai’s real estate sector alongside hospitality and brand work. How closely connected are real estate and hospitality experience design from where you sit, and do they draw on the same process?

They’re closer than people assume. A real estate launch and a hospitality brand are both, in a sense, asking people to imagine a feeling before they’ve fully experienced the place, whether that’s living somewhere or staying somewhere. Both are memory economy exercises.

We’re already engaged in conversations for potential pitches with the city’s rapidly evolving real estate sector, and the process we’d bring to that is identical to what we bring to hospitality, understand the story, understand what feeling needs to be associated with the brand, then build the experience backward from there.

Technology is becoming a bigger part of how hospitality brands design guest experiences, from immersive installations to digital touchpoints. How do you decide when technology adds to a narrative versus when it distracts from it?

Technology can accelerate research, visualisation and execution, and we use it for exactly that. But it can not sit with a guest and understand what a particular moment means to them. That part of the work, empathy, intuition, storytelling, will always be human.

The test for us is simple, does the technology serve the story, or is it there because it looks impressive. If it’s the latter, we leave it out, no matter how capable it is. Technology should disappear into the experience, not announce itself.

Looking at Envelop’s growth trajectory, from Jaipur to Abu Dhabi to a full-time UAE presence, what does success in this market look like for you three to five years from now, beyond revenue targets?

The numbers matter, and we’ve set clear targets as part of that growth. But if I look at it purely through revenue, I’d be missing the point of why we came here in the first place.

Success for me looks like the UAE becoming a place where we get to attempt ideas we simply couldn’t have executed before, projects that need this scale, this appetite for depth, this cultural richness. If in three to five years people in this market associate Envelop with experiences that are felt rather than seen, that’s the real marker, the revenue will follow that, not the other way around.