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You get what you pay for, nothing more, nothing less. Paying for five star service is possible in UAE, but it's also possible inost every country in the world.
When I went half the official taxis tried to scam me by pretending their credit card reader was broken. I had to threaten to call the cops and suddenly it was working again.
You're better off just taking uber
Sure, if you count the other rich foreigners. But when it comes to the actual people living there and not vacationing, there are none.
Not when there's a quality cliff. In a developed country, your quality of life per dollars spent is a mostly convex function. Yes, there might be significant bumps in experience, like going from first class to chartering a business jet, but they are exceptions. It sounds like it's a steep sigmoid function in UAE instead, you can't get a four-star service for half the money.
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I guess it must depend on what kind of business you're doing, I thought quite well of some of the industry people I dealt with and they were infinitely more accommodating than some of their Chinese or Central European counterparts I usually deal with. And yet somehow even more openly racist, which is pretty amazing if you've dealt with some Chinese folks.
I take it you didn't notice the large mandatory RTA sticker that says the ride is free if the machine is broken? Or maybe they tried to get one over on you as a tourist or something.
A significant amount of the people who live there are rich foreigners though, especially in Dubai. There's entire neighborhoods worth of these in major cities, I've seen them. I swear you could never speak a word of English or Arabic in that country if you're Russian or Ukrainian. But yeah you're not going to get free courtesy out of the Asian foreign workers unless you're a coethnic, they're there for business and nothing else.
Yeah I noticed it in the fine print so I didn't end up getting scammed. But the fact is that the notice is there precisely because the scam is so common.
I suppose that's true, but from where I stand I've had American cabbies try to pull that scam on me and they didn't have a notice in there, whilst nobody I know fell prey to it in the UAE. Anecdotes and all that.
One thing you're certainly right about is that, the UAE way of solving those problems is the stick: to increase control and surveillance to a degree that Westerners wouldn't necessarily be happy with.
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