Pre-opening reloaded…

It’s been a while since we had the pleasure to write about our pre-opening and grand opening operations.
In fact, it’s been such a long time, we thought we’d do it all again, albeit on a much smaller scale and in gingerbread…
We’re proud to present you the 2010 gingerbread version of the Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers:

Our culinary team will put the finishing touches on the gingerbread tower in the coming days and we’ll soon be celebrating the second grand opening!

Why not become a fan of the Bonnington on Facebook? Join our Big Facebook Fan Race! Just click on the picture below and you’ll be taken straight to our Facebook fan page! Spread the word!

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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Travel in style to and from the Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers!

As of today, our guests and visitors will not have to wait for taxis any longer when they need to go to business meetings in Dubai or want to pop across town to check out the latest shopping malls or tourist sights.
Instead, they can sink into the comfortable seats of a Chrysler 300C, courtesy of Grand Limousines, and be chauffeured to their desired destination.

The Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers and Grand Limousines have entered into a partnership to provide our guests and visitors with quality limousine transportation.
Naturally, Dubai Transport taxis will still be available around the hotel, but for those times, when you’re in a hurry or want to travel in style, we suggest you hop into a limousine.
Grand Limousine’s drivers are smartly dressed, know Dubai’s ever changing road network inside out and will ensure you reach your destination in the shortest time possible and in style.

Guests can also hire a limousine for an entire day or several days for trips around town or to other cities or Emirates.

Our limousines operate on a fixed price basis, so you know exactly how much your trip will cost you, before you board!

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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Now open! The Authors’ Lounge at the Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers!

We are happy to announce that The Authors’ Lounge is now open daily from 6.30 a.m. to 11 p.m.

The Authors' Lounge

Located in our lobby, The Authors’ Lounge is the perfect place to meet and enjoy an early morning coffee or an afternoon tea.

Freshly baked pastries and cakes, milk shakes, fruit smoothies and the day’s latest newspapers and magazines are all on offer in stylish surroundings at the heart of the Jumeirah Lakes Towers.

During the hot summer days, why not enjoy a freshly prepared salad or a freshly squeezed orange juice?

Jumeirah Lakes Towers is waking up and is worth a visit, so why not pop in and say hello? We’re located in the heart of Jumeirah Lakes Towers and the prestigious Almas Tower is just next door to us!

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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Araw ng Kalayaan

Our Filipino associates recently organised a Independence Day party at BonningTown, our associates’ accommodation building.

Associates from all other nationalities where, of course, invited, too, and judging by the pictures everybody enjoyed themselves thoroughly:

In other news this week: We are busy putting the last touches on our apartments prior to 1^st July and the days are filled with moving cutlery, crockery, linen and a variety of other items from our store rooms to the apartment floors and distributing them to the individual units:

The free-zone contractors are progressing with our access ramp and drive-court, too, and it looks like we will soon be able to use the area again.

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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Taking you for a ride…

… in one of our recently commissioned panoramic lifts!

Our ten hotel floors are served by three guest lifts, two of which are panoramic lifts. Guests going up (or down, of course) can enjoy pulling faces or waving at people while they whizz up to the Leisure Deck for a quick dip in the pool or down to The Cavendish Restaurant for a sumptuous meal.

Talking about our swimming pool: We started filling it yesterday…

The freshly filled swimming pool on our Leisure Deck

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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TVs, planters and yet more twittering…

Locatel, our supplier for interactive in-room TVs, started to commission and test the first hotel room TVs today. Naturally, some of us witnessed this historic moment and, while not quite as cool as a visit to Holly- or Bollywood, we were still fairly impressed and took a couple of pictures of the occasion, which you can see on Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/4npuu and http://twitpic.com/4npu3.

Talking about Twitpic: If you’re not “twittering” yet, you might want to check it out at www.twitter.com – it seems like the entire world is tweeting these days. With around 400 followers, we are officially Dubai’s third most tweeting hotel and we’re ranked 33rd amongst twitterers in the UAE on Twitterholic. You can vote for us on Twibs and help us to become even more visible.

As you would expect, many other and less technological or geeky things happened during the last few days: Today, our Front Office Manager moved into her own office on the ground floor from our shared pre-opening office on the mezzanine floor and our IT Manager continued to work on fine-tuning and setting up our freshly installed server.

A good number of jolly orange planters arrived on our hotel and apartment floors a couple of days ago, too. Check out a photo of them here.

Our partners from the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre free-zone started to send their contractors into the areas just outside our hotel a couple of days ago and several people are now busily completing our drive-court and access ramp, both of which fall into “free-zone” land and could therefore not be completed until our tower was done.

Initially, the areas started to resemble a football field (see pictures here: http://bit.ly/xBuIy)

Finally, on a totally unrelated issue: Hospitality Action’s “Heroes Day” is coming up. Hospitality Action, the hospitality industry benevolent organisation, provides vital financial support and advice to all who work, or have worked within hospitality in the UK. From hotels, restaurants, offices, bars, catering colleges and kitchens, hospitality industry employees will be bursting forth as Hospitality Action heroes on Friday 22nd May. By wearing their pants proudly adorned with Hospitality Action hero stickers and raising money in whatever way they can, they will be making industry history by taking part in our largest fundraising drive to date. This action hero pant-wearing day of fun is part of Hospitality Action Week which will run from 18th-24th May with the industry universally donning their pants on Friday 22nd May. You can find out more details here.

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you.

The first words spoken by Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, when he made the first ever call on March 10, 1876, to his assistant, Thomas Watson were “Mr. Watson–come here–I want to see you.”
The going “live” of our telephone and Internet lines at the Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers a couple of days ago reminded us of Mr. Bell and his historic first telephone call. The first call made by one of our associates was naturally a little more mundane than Graham Bell’s and the words spoken were probably something along the lines of “Hey, I think it works now!”
The entire telephone system and our computer and server networks are currently still being fine-tuned and it will probably take another week or so until everything is up and running correctly and smoothly.

Other than getting our network infrastructure up and running, we’ve been busy placing more furniture in the public areas, hanging the last few remaining pictures in the corridors and lobby areas and installing Quibla signs in all our apartments, rooms and suites.

We’ve also further expanded our social media presence by creating a page on Freebase. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our Facebook fans and Twitter followers – both accounts are getting more and more traffic and people seem to enjoy being able to “virtually” interact with us at the touch of a button.
If you haven’t done so already, please feel free to connect with us on any of the following platforms:

Facebook

Plaxo

Twitter

Quibla sign in our show apartment

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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We’re moving!

Over the next few days the last few members of our pre-opening team who, up to now, still manned our office at the Emaar Business Park, will finally shut up shop and move to their new permanent home at the Hotel in Jumeirah Lakes Towers.

After more than two years as part of the Emaar Business Park community it’s time to say good-bye to our neighbours in building 4 and lunch at Oregano, Hurrah or the Organic Café and start saying hello to Jumeirah Lakes Towers.

Some things we’ll miss:

Double-shot ice-shaken vanilla-flavoured espressos from Starbucks in building 3

Being able to walk to Choitrams after work to buy food for dinner

The Organic Café’s yummie donughts

Several ATMs within walking distance

Some things we definitely won’t miss:

Having to wait ages for a lift to or from the fourth floor because employees of a certain bank on the first floor cannot be bothered to take the stairs (it’s only one floor up or down for heaven’s sake)

Inconsistent car parking access security (sometimes you make it in, sometimes you don’t)

Weirdo air-conditioning controls (your choice is arctic or tropic)

Total absence of regular window cleaning

Good-bye Business Park!

Our new location

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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Car Lifts!?

The Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers will be one of the first, if not the first, hotel in Dubai to feature two car lifts.

The lifts will allow our valet parkers to park guests’ and visitors’ cars in one of our five parking basements swiftly, safely and without having to negotiate extensive ramps or run to the end of a vast car park to retrieve cars again.

Once a guest has handed over his/her car, the valet parker simply drives it into the car lift, presses a button and, a short time later, drives out again and parks the car in a secure and air-conditioned parking bay.

We commissioned the first of the two car lifts a couple of days ago and our official car lift tester forwarded us the following, slightly bizarre, shots:

Inside the car lift during commissioning

Don't forget to select your floor when you drive in...

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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What’s on TV tonight?

Today, we finalized our soft-opening TV channel lineup. During our upcoming soft-opening phase, our guests will be able to choose between the following channels:

Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers: Soft-opening TV channel lineup

Our selection of TV channels will be supplemented by our Video-on-Demand service, which will offer the best of Hollywood & Bollywood movies just three months after their theatrical release and before the DVD and Pay-TV release.

We have plans to expand our TV channel lineup even further once we are fully open.

 

Our homepage: Bonnington Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Dubai

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