Dubai Mall Tickets and Tours | GetExperience.com

The Dubai Mall opened in November 2008 at the foot of the Burj Khalifa, and the word mall undersells it. Total floor area passes 1.1 million square metres, of which leasable shop space is under a third. Footfall runs past a hundred million people a year.

What fills the rest of the floor

Shopping is rarely what visitors come out talking about. The building swallowed a set of attractions that would each be a separate outing elsewhere.

• Dubai Aquarium. A ten-million-litre tank behind one acrylic panel, with a walkthrough tunnel and an underwater zoo above it.
• The ice rink. Olympic-size, used for public sessions and for league hockey.
• Dubai Dino. A Diplodocus skeleton twenty-four metres long, standing free in the souk dome.
• House of Hype. A floor of interactive and augmented-reality rooms, ticketed on its own and sold by the hour.
• The rest. A cinema, a gold souk wing, a waterfall with diver sculptures dropping through it.

The lake side

The eastern face opens onto a man-made lake. The Dubai Fountain plays on it at lunchtime, then every half hour through the evening until eleven. It was rebuilt over five months in 2025, so older advice is out of date.

Practical

• Scale. Allow twenty minutes to cross the building, and remember which door you came in by.
• Parking. Free for four hours on weekdays and six at weekends, then billed to a Salik account automatically. No tickets, no barriers.
• Metro. The Red Line stops at Burj Khalifa/Dubai Mall, with an air-conditioned footbridge of about 820 metres to the door.
• Dress. Shoulders and knees covered. It is enforced at the entrances more often than visitors expect.
• Timing. The first evening fountain show packs the terrace; the last two hours before closing are the quietest inside.
• Arriving from another emirate. Private cars run to the mall door from Sharjah and Ajman in under an hour, from Abu Dhabi in about ninety minutes.