Dubaiwoman

One of the cinemas that are overrated or over publicized is Grand Cinemas in Festival City.  On the first week of its grand opening, my hubby and I reserved tickets via phone and booked VIP seats only to be greeted by staff who were inexperienced with the system; one made a new booking instead of the seats we originally booked and deleted our previous reserved seats.

Cinemas in Dubai: No food or drinks are allowed from any other food outlet except the one provided by the Cinema.  So we scoured through the food and beverage they offered.  We didn’t find coffee nor cheese popcorn. ??? Sure you wanna compete with the other cinemas around?  So we asked the guys getting the tickets up front if we could bring coffee from Starbucks as they didn’t have coffee anyway.  One said no, another said yes.  Thank you.   Hmmm..  So we stuck to water and caramel popcorn plus a bag of M&Ms.  Everything was quite tolerable until we reached the VIP seats. Uhmmmm…. VIP?  Does this mean a leaning chair which requires a heavy person to sit and lean back otherwise it won’t budge VIP?    Tell me again why we had to pay twice the price of a seat we would rather pay the regular rate..  We vowed not to take VIP seats again.

Just recently, Grand Cinema in Festival City introduced 3D.  Well we decided to go again as the nearest 3D cinema would mean to cross the other end of Dubai which is not quite convenient for us.  This time with lower expectations but we were hoping some improvement considering that they opened for several months now.

So we bought tickets, no VIP this time.  We then lined up for some  munchies, still no cheese popcorn.  Was quite excited to see a hot beverage station, was hoping this would be coffee but no… hot c hocolate apparently sells well in the cinemas that they ruled out coffee and thought of selling hot chocolate. OK, so hot chocolate but no coffee????   This is one question I would love them to answer.  What could be so wrong with coffee that they refrain to sell it?

Anyway, so we didn’t fuss much more about the coffee and tried to concentrate on the movie.  The movie experience was nice, especially with the 3D effect.  Once we finished, i rushed to the loo where I was in complete shock.  For a cinema called Grand Cinema, there was nothing grand about their loo.  Trash was kept in a black trash bag by the entrance of the loo, tiles were missing and the flush was missing in one of the cubicles.

To the management, I think you better have a good look at this.  Oh and please, if you truly care about your customers, better think about your market and what they need to have  the ultimate movie-watching experience.