Hot Air Balloon Dubai: Sunrise Flight and Desert Breakfast

A sunrise balloon flight over the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve, from AED 699, including hotel transfers, about an hour airborne and breakfast on the sand afterwards. The pickup is brutally early and there is no way around it, so it helps to understand why before you book.

Why the pickup is before dawn

Balloons over the Dubai desert launch at first light, and only at first light. Desert air is stable in a narrow window either side of sunrise. Once the sand starts absorbing heat, thermals build and ballooning stops being either comfortable or safe. That puts hotel pickup somewhere between 4am and 5am depending on where you are staying and the time of year.

It is an unreasonable hour. It is also the reason the flight is worth doing: you are in the air for the one hour of the day when the desert is cool, still and silent.

Where you actually fly

The drive out takes roughly an hour, into the Dubai Desert Conservation Reserve. The reserve covers 225 square kilometres, which by its own figures is 4.7 percent of Dubai's total land area, and it exists to protect the last stretch of undeveloped desert in the emirate.

That protection is why it is worth watching the ground rather than only the horizon. Arabian oryx have been reintroduced there since 1999 and now roam freely across the reserve, alongside sand gazelle and camel herds. Nothing involving wild animals is guaranteed, but sightings are common.

How the morning runs

1. Hotel pickup, typically between 4am and 5am.
2. Around an hour of driving out to the launch site.
3. You arrive while the ground crew is still inflating the envelope. Watch this part. A balloon going from flat fabric to fully upright takes about twenty minutes and it is loud, hot and genuinely dramatic.
4. Safety briefing, then lift-off as the sun clears the horizon.
5. Roughly sixty minutes airborne, climbing to as much as 4,000 feet, around 1,200 metres.
6. Landing, breakfast in the desert, a signed flight certificate, and the drive back.

Four to five hours door to door. You are usually back at your hotel before mid-morning with the rest of the day ahead of you.

What the flight is actually like

Quieter than people expect and far less frightening. A balloon travels with the wind rather than through it, so there is no draught, no sense of speed and almost no movement underfoot. The burner is loud in short bursts and then you get silence. People who avoid rollercoasters are usually fine in a basket, because the sensation has nothing in common with one.

The pilot controls altitude and nothing else. There is no steering, so no two flights follow the same track and you land wherever the wind puts you. The ground crew follows by road and meets the balloon there.

What to wear and bring

• Closed-toe shoes. Landing sites are sand and scrub, not tarmac.
• Layers. Pre-dawn desert is genuinely cold in winter and warms very fast after sunrise.
• A camera with a wrist or neck strap. Nothing dropped from a basket comes back.
• Leave the hat off while airborne. There is little sun at that hour and it will blow away.
• Sunglasses are for the drive home rather than the flight.

Restrictions worth checking first

• Minimum age is normally five, and children need to be able to stand unaided in the basket.
• Not suitable during pregnancy.
• Recent surgery, or back or heart conditions: speak to us before booking.
• Landing is taken in a braced standing position and can be bumpy.
• Maximum weight limits apply and are confirmed when you book.

Season and weather

Desert ballooning in the UAE is a cool-season activity. The main operators fly from around the start of October to the end of May and pause over the summer, so check with us before you build a summer date around it. Inside the season it is still weather-dependent day to day, and wind at ground level is what cancels flights rather than heat. The call is the pilot's and it is final. If your flight is cancelled you are offered another date or a full refund.

The two different balloon rides in Dubai

This catches people out, so it is worth being blunt about. There are two unrelated things sold in Dubai as a balloon ride. One is a free-flying balloon that lifts off in the desert, drifts with the wind and lands somewhere else entirely. That is this flight. The other is a tethered balloon on the Palm, which rises on a cable, stays attached to the ground and comes back down to the same spot a few minutes later.

Both are worth doing for what they are, but they are not comparable, and the very low prices you may have seen advertised belong to the tethered one. If you are comparing quotes and one looks far cheaper than everything else, that is almost always why.

If the early start is not going to happen

For height without the alarm clock, the Burj Khalifa observation decks open from mid-morning, and the Dubai Frame gives the old-against-new view from 150 metres. At the opposite end of the day, a Dubai Marina dinner cruise handles the evening.

Planning your visit? Read our guide: Hot air balloon Dubai: price and what is included.