Graham White stood in front of a 15-floor hotel in Benidorm, filmed it glowing in neon light and told his followers it looked like Dubai.
The comment section did not agree.
The Birmingham-based TikToker, known online as Grumet, has more than 115,000 followers and regularly posts about life in the Spanish resort.
In his latest clip, he pointed his camera at The Royal Arrow hotel and called it a “skyscraper.”
He described Benidorm as a “playground for the rich” and claimed influencers were ditching Dubai to fly there instead.
“You can understand why all the influencers from Dubai come to Benidorm now,” he told CreatorZine.
“They call it the new Dubai. Where else would you see something like that. When I post videos, people think it’s actually Dubai but it’s not, it’s Benidorm.”
He gestured at the building, the palm trees and the seagulls. “You can’t tell me that doesn’t look like Dubai.”
His audience could, and did, tell him exactly that.
‘Playground for Universal Credit’
The responses were immediate and not especially gentle.
“Playground for Universal Credit,” wrote one viewer.
“Mate that’s a lie,” said Jay.
Graham replied: “It’s not is it, why are people saying this.”
Jorge pointed out the obvious: “Skyscraper, lad it’s about 10 floors.”
One commenter offered a more measured take: “It’s nothing like Dubai but that hotel is actually nice, stayed there last year, would recommend it.”
The Benidorm brand
White has built his following around Benidorm content: cheap deals, nightlife, expat life and the general atmosphere of a resort that has been a budget destination for British tourists for decades.
The comparison to Dubai, a city built on oil wealth with buildings that are literally the tallest on earth, was a stretch even by content creator standards.
Benidorm has a skyline, of a sort. It has more high-rise buildings per square metre than almost anywhere in Europe, a quirk of its 1960s development boom.
But comparing it to Dubai because one hotel has neon lighting and there are palm trees nearby is the kind of claim that only works if nobody in your audience has been to either place.
Why it matters
The clip is a small, perfect example of how hyperbole functions in travel content. White almost certainly knows Benidorm is not Dubai.
The comparison exists to generate exactly the reaction it got: disbelief, mockery, shares and quote tweets.
The comment section roasting him is the engagement. The people tagging friends to laugh at the claim are the distribution.
Whether White genuinely believes what he said is irrelevant to the outcome, which is that a clip of a mid-rise hotel in a budget resort reached an audience far larger than a straightforward Benidorm video ever would.
He posted something absurd, the internet corrected him loudly, and everyone involved got what they came for.
The seagulls, for the record, are not exclusive to Dubai.
