Dubai Mall Tickets and Tours | GetExperience.com

The Dubai Mall is one of the largest shopping centres in the world by total area, with something over twelve hundred shops spread across four floors at the foot of the Burj Khalifa. It opened in 2008 and it functions less as a mall than as a covered district: an Olympic-size ice rink on one side, a ten-million-litre aquarium with a walkthrough tunnel on the other, a cinema, a souk-styled gold wing, an indoor waterfall running two floors, and a dinosaur skeleton standing in a corridor. Around eighty million people come through a year, which is more than visit most countries. It connects directly to the Burj Khalifa entrance and opens onto the terrace above the Dubai Fountain.

Shopping is not why most visitors end up here — the mall is the anchor that everything downtown attaches to. Burj Khalifa tickets start from inside it, the aquarium and the underwater zoo are ticketed attractions in their own right, the fountain show runs every half hour on the lake outside from the early evening, and the restaurant terraces along that lake are where people eat before or after going up the tower. City tours use the mall as their afternoon stop, and it is where almost everyone retreats when the temperature outside makes walking impossible.

Practical. It is enormous and badly signed for a first visit: allow twenty minutes to cross it, and note where you came in. The fountain runs from six in the evening until eleven, every thirty minutes, and the crowds on the terrace build for the first show of the night. Modest dress is expected — shoulders and knees covered — and is enforced more than visitors expect. The metro Red Line stops at Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall with a long covered walkway. Parking is free but the multi-storeys fill at weekends. The mall is open late, until midnight on Thursday to Saturday, and the last two hours are the calmest.