Dubai with Kids: What Works in Summer, and What to Skip

Dubai is one of the easier cities in the world to visit with children — everything is air-conditioned, connected, spotless and set up for families — with one enormous caveat, which is the heat.

Between June and September, outdoor plans with young children do not work between about ten in the morning and five in the evening. This is not a matter of stamina; the temperature is genuinely dangerous for small bodies. Plan around it rather than through it: outdoors early, indoors in the middle, outdoors again at dusk.

The good news is that Dubai has more genuinely good indoor attractions than almost anywhere, and several of them are better for children than for adults.

The Green Planet in City Walk is a sealed bio-dome with a working rainforest inside it — sloths, free-flying birds, reptiles, and the largest man-made indoor tree in the world. Roughly an hour and a quarter, and the feeding sessions through the day are the best part; ask at the desk when you arrive and plan around them.

The Dubai Aquarium in Dubai Mall has a walk-through tunnel with rays and sharks overhead, an Underwater Zoo arranged by habitat, and penguins. About an hour. It also happens to sit inside the mall, so it combines with everything else there.

AYA Universe at WAFI is twelve rooms of interactive light and sound — floors that respond to footsteps, walls that answer touch. Ninety minutes, and it works equally on adults, which is a short list.

All three are fully air-conditioned, which in July is the only specification that matters.

Atlantis Aquaventure on the Palm is the big one — over a hundred slides, a private beach, and, crucially, separate Splashers zones for younger children so families are not trying to do both at once. The Lost Chambers Aquarium is included in the pass and is where to go in the middle of the day when the slides are queued and the sun is worst. Arrive at opening in summer.

What to skip with young children: the Burj Khalifa, which is a queue followed by a view they will look at for four minutes; the desert safari, where the dune bashing is too rough for under-fives and the camp evening runs late; and the long day trips to Abu Dhabi or the east coast, which are three hours in a car before anything happens.

Save the desert for a family with teenagers, where it becomes the best thing in the trip.