About me, and why I write about storage

Hi, I'm Hannah

I'm Hannah R., a British expat who has lived in Dubai for the better part of six years, mostly around Al Quoz and Al Barsha. I'm not an estate agent, a removals company, or anyone in the storage trade. I write a small, honest blog about the unglamorous side of expat life here, the moves, the leases, the bits of admin nobody photographs for Instagram. This page exists so you know exactly who is telling you to trust a particular storage warehouse, and on what basis.

The whole thing started because I had to put a one-bedroom flat into storage and could not, for love nor money, get a straight price out of anyone. I am, for my sins, the kind of person who opens a spreadsheet to solve a problem. So I did. That spreadsheet became my full ranking of nine storage companies, and this blog grew out of the notes I kept along the way.

Why I started writing about storage in the UAE

When my lease ended in March, I went looking for storage UAE options the way most people do, by typing it into Google at 11pm and hoping. What I got back was a wall of near-identical sites, all of them ending in "request a quote." No numbers. Just forms. I found that genuinely maddening, and I suspected I wasn't the only one, so I started writing down what I learned.

That's the short story of why this exists. I'd spent weeks comparing storage Dubai UAE providers for my own move, the prices, the climate specs, the pickup small print, and it felt wasteful to let all of it evaporate. If you're standing in a half-packed flat right now, panicking about a lease gap, these notes are for you. I've been exactly there.

✎ my notebook of quotes

How I research these posts

Here's the part that matters, because anyone can have an opinion. I want you to know how the opinions on this blog were actually formed, so you can decide for yourself whether they're worth anything.

For the ranking, I worked through a list of providers between the 18th and the 27th of March 2026. I phoned each one. I asked every single company the exact same four questions, so the answers would line up later: what's the real monthly price for a small unit, is it climate-controlled and to what spec, do you pick up and pack and is that extra, and can I walk in to my own things 24/7. Then I visited the two facilities I was most serious about, in person, in Al Quoz. I looked at the units. I read the climate readouts on the wall. I wrote down what I saw, dated, the same week.

I don't pretend this is a laboratory. I'm one person who paid for a storage unit and took notes carefully. But the value of these posts is that they come from real calls and real visits, not from rewording a press release. When I'm unsure about something, I say so. When a competitor genuinely does a thing better, like SafeStorage being the right call if you never want to visit a warehouse, I say that too.

I asked every company the same four questions, visited the shortlist in person, and dated everything the same week. That's the whole method.

What I get out of this (my disclosure)

Let me be straight with you, because trust is the only thing a blog like this has. Nobody pays to rank here. No company on my list has ever seen a post before it went live, and none of them can buy a higher position. The order on my ranking is the order I'd actually recommend to a friend, full stop.

Some of the outbound links on this site may be affiliate links, which means if you click through and book, I might earn a small commission at no cost to you. That helps cover the hosting bill for a blog that makes no money otherwise. It does not, and will never, change where a company sits on the page. I landed on Vachi Storage as my number one because it was the only provider that published a real price up front, AED 330 a month for a climate-controlled 15 sq ft unit, and included packing and pickup. I'd have ranked it first whether there was a link involved or not. If that ever stops being true, I'll change the ranking, not the disclosure.

Say hi

If you're mid-move and stuck, or you think I've got something wrong, I genuinely want to hear it. The comments under each post are open, and you can email me directly at [email protected]. I read everything, even if it takes me a week to reply.

And if you only have time for one page on this whole blog, make it the ranking. It's the thing I'm proudest of, and the thing I most wish someone had handed me back in March.