Nour El Naggar

Review of InterContinental Abu Dhabi

We were at Intercontinental Abu Dhabi for a weeken...

We were at Intercontinental Abu Dhabi for a weekend getaway - although we ended up enjoying the beach time we had, our experience(s) with the staff were terrible.
Check-in: we were greeted by a friendly receptionist who took our details, luggage tag and told us to wait for our room to be ready and they'd offer us a welcome drink (even though it was well after 2pm so this should've been ready straight away). We ended up waiting 30 minutes, no one came with a drink and we ended up having to go ask again for our key. The bags arrived 30 minutes after we got our key, which delayed us even more.
Restaurants: we ate twice at the hotel, on the beach where we got plastic cutlery to eat our pasta, it took them another 10 minutes to get us proper cutlery, as if this was an unusual request. The next time we ate at the hotel was the breakfast buffet, the food wasn't very tasty and I literally had one of the waiters snatch a croissant from my hand claiming that if I put it in the rolling toaster, it'll explode. A second later someone else's croissant rolled down with no damage so the waiter apologized and said he thought it wouldn't work. But come on, use your words don't snatch food out of my hands!
Rooms: we were assigned a room that had a connecting door - with very noisy neighbors when we arrived. When we went to reception to ask about alternatives, they sometimes ignored us for a good 3-5 minutes to speak to other guests. It took them 15 minutes to tell us that they have no rooms, which I don't really trust because we only booked the room the night before and it looked like there were lots left and not 'overbooked' as they claimed. They even called 30 minutes later when we were about to nap, to ask if there's noise even though they repeated again on the phone that THEY DON'T HAVE ANY ROOMS.
As you can see, terrible experience with the staff but the weather was great and we enjoyed the beach/pool facilities so the rest of the encounters didn't affect the trip as much as you'd expect.