Heat of the moment: The pros and cons of a stopover in Abu Dhabi

I'm an enthusiast - an evangelist, even - for a stopover between Australia and Europe. A pause in an in-between time zone helps reduce jet lag but, more importantly, it breaks up the flight. Fourteen-and-a-half hours is the maximum anyone can sit on a plane without either seizing up, going mad, or watching Crazy Rich Asians on the seatback entertainment system.

As a stopover destination, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates has its pros and cons. It's about 13 hours from Australia and seven hours from London, six hours behind AEST and four hours ahead of GMT. It can be an expensive place to enjoy a drink outside of happy hour (a regularly priced bottle of beer is about $19; a glass of wine closer to $25) but happy hour begins first thing in the evening - which is last thing at night in the body of a stopping-over Australian.

The weather is always hot, which is great if your ultimate destination is cold - but it's difficult to pack for two extremes. In December, you'll feel overdressed in a jumper in Abu Dhabi but half-naked in a light jacket in London.

One good reason to take a break in Abu Dhabi is that you might be able to get it for free. Etihad Airways operates the frustratingly opaque Abu Dhabi Stopover program, which offers cheap or complimentary accommodation to Etihad passengers who transit between one and four nights in the emirate.

The complimentary option is only available for one- or two-night stays in a handful of three- or four-star hotels and, according to the rules, I must book my flight before I can confirm the availability of a room. I do this, only to discover there is no free stopover accommodation offered on the dates I have chosen.

The alternative is to take a room at a "premium" four- or five-star hotel at a discount of about 40 per cent. That would be fine, except that every room I check is more expensive with the discount than the best rate offered on the hotel's own website.

After several emails to Etihad and a pointless half-hour conversation with a call centre, I finish up with a reservation at the Premier Inn Abu Dhabi International Airport Hotel.

My flight arrives in Abu Dhabi at 5am. Only one other passenger heads for passport control. Everyone else has a connecting flight, which shows how few takers there are for the stopover package. I pass through immigration and customs in about five minutes, then catch a shuttle bus to the Premier Inn.

The best thing about the Premier Inn is that it is attached by a walkway to Terminals Two and Three. Unfortunately, since November 2023, Etihad has operated out of Terminal A, which is an 11-minute drive from the hotel.

My room isn't ready when I arrive at the Premier Inn, but I only have to wait about 30 minutes before the amusingly unflappable receptionist issues me with my keycard. It's a good, honest hotel, with spacious rooms, a passable restaurant and bar, and - best of all - a rooftop pool and spa, but it's about a 35-minute taxi ride from Abu Dhabi's Corniche.

While this kind of inconvenience is built into staying at an airport hotel, local taxi companies treat the Premier Inn as if it were a part of the airport itself and level a 20-25 dirham ($8-$10) flag-fall for pick-ups instead of the standard five dirham. You might be better off walking out onto the highway and flagging down a passing cab, if you can be bothered.

Less than 10 kilometres from the airport is Yas Island, a "leisure island" connected to the mainland by various bridges and highways. It's a kind of Gold Coast on the Gulf, with a SeaWorld, a Waterworld, a Warner Bros World and, for good measure, a Ferrari World. There's also a very big Ikea, as if kids might be persuaded to regard furniture shopping as a big, fun adventure (spoiler: they can't).

The last time I stopped over in Abu Dhabi, I stayed in an executive room at the Hilton Abu Dhabi Yas Island. The free food and drink in the lounge almost balanced out the extra cost of a luxury hotel.

But not quite.

Once a day, the Premier Inn runs a free shuttle bus to Abu Dhabi Louvre via the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, but it's an uncomfortable ride and takes twice as long as a taxi to reach the Louvre.

The drive into town presents the curious spectacle of a brand-new city crowded with steel-and-glass office towers and apartment blocks and speckled with unlikely looking old buildings. It's as if a child has mixed up their Lego and built a cityscape out of two different kits.

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque complex is the third largest mosque in the world, with 82 domes and four 106-metre-tall minarets. It's like a small, perfectly planned town. Its beauty lies in its apparent architectural simplicity, but the building looks even better at night when the darkness ages the marble and lends it a mythical, almost eternal cast.

Day tours of Abu Dhabi generally take in the mosque and the Qasr Al Watan royal palace. I assume the royal palace is the regally opulent Arabian mansion I notice from the road, but that turns out to be the seven-star, government-owned Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental Hotel, one of the most expensive hotels ever built. I don't have time to check out the hotel (where the restaurant, apparently, serves camel burgers sprinkled with gold dust), but I imagine it's better appointed than the Premier Inn.

The Emirates Palace has a private beach on the Corniche, the eight-kilometre promenade along the coastline of the Persian Gulf. The walk alone would be worth the stopover, but it's best tackled out of the scorching sun in the early morning or evening.

But the most wonderful attraction in Abu Dhabi is the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a universal museum of human civilisation, built in the hope that the world doesn't forget the emirate when the oil and gas runs out. It's almost the perfect museum and, if you only have one day in town it would be best spent here, marvelling at the collected achievements of humanity curated with such sensitivity and taste.

The food at the Louvre is broadly delicious but recent years have seen a flowering of indigenous Emirati cuisine, which I'm also keen to sample. Meylas Emirati Restaurant in Al Muneera has an entry in the local Michelin guide. At the edge of a private beach at Al Raha Creek, it's hard to find - especially if your taxi driver thinks he knows better than Google Maps - but worth the effort.

A traditional Emirati breakfast staple is flatbread, and I could start every day with a rgaag (flatbread) filled with cream cheese. For lunch, on the recommendation of the staff, I choose a traditional Bedouin stew, salonat badu, with lamb and rice.

The helping is huge, the meat is as soft as cream cheese: it's like the lamb you always hope to find in Greek restaurants but rarely exists outside memory. A generous side dish of traditionally spiced bajela (broad beans) tastes faintly perfumed. Instructions on the placemat explain how to eat Bedouin food with your fingers (basically, you pick it up and put it in your mouth).

The whole experience is unnervingly perfect.

I end up breaking both legs of my journey at the Premier Inn. On my way back to Australia, I hope to use Etihad's Transit Connect package, which offers free accommodation to passengers whose layover is longer than 10 hours. But I don't properly examine my ticket, and it turns out my layover is nine hours and 35 minutes, which means I must pay the full rate for the hotel room.

But I manage to get a good half-a-night's sleep, and even grab 20 heavenly minutes in the pool in the morning.

I can't use the free airport shuttle for my return flight because all the seats on the bus are already taken. This adds another overpriced taxi flag-fall and an irritating extra expense to my stay. I'm feeling a bit angry at Etihad, but that passes when I get back to Australia and suffer from less jet lag than any previous Europe trip (and I've done a few).

On reflection, the same is true of the outgoing leg. Abu Dhabi seems to be the ideal place to break the journey, but the Premier Inn is not the ideal place to stay. Next time, I will book a hotel midway between the airport and the Corniche. Somewhere close to Meylas would be fine...

Read more on Explore:

Getting there: Etihad flies from Sydney and Melbourne to London via Abu Dhabi every day. Fares start at $1620.

Staying there: f you don't get a complimentary room with the stopover package, double rooms at the Premier Inn Abu Dhabi International Airport Hotel start at $109.

Explore more: visitabudhabi.ae; louvreabudhabi.ae; meylas.com/en

The writer travelled at his own expense.

Pictures: Shutterstock; Getty Images; Mark Dapin