For one, the traffic is lighter. It took me no time to get from Park Hyatt Dubai to the Palm Jumeirah, for instance. The new monorail and two additional expressways have definitely helped but one gets a feeling there are fewer cars and people around as well. 

(Left: One of the empty palm leaves yet to be built on at Palm Jumeirah)

My driver from Kerala, India, has been in Dubai for 13 years. I asked him how he survived the economic meltdown. “It was very, very hard,” he shook his head. He didn’t lose his job but his income was certainly affected.“But things are getting better,” he said. 

And that’s the refrain I keep hearing. There’s clearly an air of hope that the worst is over for this once-invincible place where anything seemed possible and then it all came tumbling down with the Global Financial Crisis.Hoteliers I speak to say they are seeing some recovery, some more than others. But they say it with some tentativeness and less bullishness than before.

Occupancies have firmed up but rates are still soft and those days when hotels could charge supplements on top of regular rates depending on which trade event was in town – well, those days are over.

To compound matters, I am told, 10,000 more hotels rooms will be added to the supply this year which already stands at 68,000. And this morning, there was an announcement from the Al Habtoor Group that is planning to build the biggest hotel in the UAE on Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai – it would have 2,000 rooms and suites.

Which would beg the question, “Why?” but then Dubai, pre- or post-the Bubble Pop, has always confounded. That hasn’t changed.

The markets have however. European and American traffic are down but growth is being seen from the Gulf states – a major market for most hotels now – and increasingly, India and China are being seen as the new markets.

There’s definitely more realism on the ground today than two years ago. Most people who were here when the market imploded still bear the scars of those “very, very tough” days, said one hotelier.

(Right: A ghost-like city that’s popped up in the last four years from nothing)

“A lot of people have left but a lot of people have also come in,” he said. “It’s become even more transient than before.”

And that’s one thing that’s always struck me about Dubai and that hasn’t changed. It’s the biggest Transit Café in the world. There are more nationalities passing through here and working than in any other place in the world.

A hotel can have more than 50 different nationalities on its payroll. At Park Hyatt, I was driven by Indians, checked in by a Japanese, served by a Thai, had my IT problems solved by an Indonesian and had the door opened by a Kenyan and a Burmese

I am told that Jumeirah’s headquarters employs more than 100 nationalities – that’s just about half the number of countries in the world. 

All are here to make money and secure a better life for themselves and their families, of course. But it’s not as easy now to hire staff, one hotelier told me, because source markets are doing pretty well themselves and Dubai’s no longer as attractive as it used to be.

Don’t get me wrong though. I think the old spirit and vision of Dubai to be the capital of the universe hasn’t changed.

The clearest indicator is Burj Khalifa (left) which is indeed impressive. The tallest building in the city sticks out like a needle in a haystack of skyscrapers and seems to scream, “Look at me, I am not going away.”

And yesterday I went on a tour of a hotel that proved that the old days of opulence and indulgence are not completely over in this city which grew out of the sand once upon a time.

More of that in another dispatch.