The Burj Al Arab is a luxury hotel located in Dubai. The hotel rests on an artificial island constructed 280 m (920 ft) offshore. To secure a foundation, the builders drove 230 forty-meter (130 ft) long concrete piles into the sand. Burj Al Arab is the world’s second tallest hotel (not including buildings with mixed use). The structure of the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang North Korea, is 9 m (30 ft) taller than the Burj Al Arab.
Burj Al Arab
The hotel is officially rated Five-Star Deluxe. However, it is frequently described as “the world’s only Seven-Star hotel”, although the hotel management claims to never have done that themselves. In the words of a Jumeirah Group spokesperson: “There’s not a lot we can do to stop it. We’re not encouraging the use of the term. We’ve never used it in our advertising.” According to the group, the “Seven-Star” notion was brought to being by a British journalist who visited the hotel on a pre-opening press trip. The journalist “described the Burj al Arab in her article as above and beyond anything she had ever seen and called it a seven-star hotel.”
