- The Dubai Mall is one of the biggest shopping centers in the world.
- I found that I couldn't get to grips with it even after two different visits over two separate days, and even when I used the mall's own app to navigate.
- But I did find that it was filled with entertainment options to break up the shopping, like selfie rooms and a giant aquarium.
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The Dubai Mall is the world's biggest shopping mall by land area, and I was curious to see what it was like to experience more than 10 million square feet of shopping in a city known as one of the most luxurious on Earth.
It doesn't have a ski slope like its rival Mall of the Emirates, which I tried out while I was there, but it has a huge aquarium and access to the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa.
The mall actually does a good job of providing entertainment and light to stop things from getting too claustrophobic or overwhelming. But I still found the experience to be exhausting, and repeatedly got lost, couldn't get the mall's navigation systems to work, and spent 20 minutes trying to find a way out before relenting and queuing for 10 minutes for a taxi.
I visited over two separate days, and still couldn't get to grips with the place.
This is what my visits were like:
The Dubai Mall is the world's biggest shopping mall by land area, and promises more than 1,200 stores and hundreds of food outlets over more than 10 million square feet (one million square meters).
Source: Visit Dubai
On a recent trip to Dubai, I decided to visit it. Partly because I was curious about its sheer size, and partly because I wanted to check out the city's legendary shopping.
But first, I actually needed to get there — and that journey gave me a glimpse of the scale of what was in store. I decided to take the metro, which was very convenient until I realized that the raised passage from the train to the mall took 10 whole minutes to walk down.
It gave views of Dubai's famous skyscrapers and, as you got closer, the outside of the luxurious mall.
It also felt bizarre that the journey was filled with ads for the mall itself. Everyone in th passage was going to the mall already, so why bother?
I was delighted when I finally saw a sign that told me I'd reached the mall ...
.... only to realize that I wasn't fully in yet, and was instead in an area filled with smaller, more tourist-focused stands.
A few minutes later and, finally, I'd made it!
The first thing I noticed was just how large every individual store was — you couldn't see the back of most.
The mall is divided up so it never actually feels that big when you wander around. Every section almost feels like its own mall, so it takes a while to get to grips with the sheer scale of the complex.
I unintentionally ended up in the decadent "Fashion Avenue" area almost immediately.
It felt like its own, self-contained mall, filled with luxury brands.
Even the cafés were extremely decadent.
I made my out of the luxury section, and got another glimpse into the glitz of the mall. From inside the huge Nike store, I could see the famous Dubai Fountain.
The mall was filled with signs, but they didn't make things that much clearer to me. Aquarium? Underwater Zoo?? Are those not the same thing???
I never managed to figure out the difference, but I did see huge crowds gathered to watch the aquatic life that could be seen without paying to enter, as well as the huge queues to get inside. It was pretty cool to have my shopping interrupted by views of sharks, rays, and fish.
The aquarium has a 10-million liter tank, and describes itself as "the largest suspended aquariums in the world."
You can go through a long tunnel, take a glass boat tour, or even meet an otter or a shark while in cage — big experiences for a mall.
It was time to return to wandering around, where I saw things like "selfie rooms" that I assumed were designed to break up the slog of navigating the place.
I ducked in to one that was filled with lights. (My selfie game is not very strong).
There were also decorated walls that were hugely popular with visitors.
After walking around some more, I was exhausted and decided it was time to leave. But there was a problem: I couldn't figure out how, unless I took the metro again.
There were no signs for an exit, and it took me 15 minutes to reach a door that looked like it led to the outside. I wanted to order an Uber, but ended up crossing an enclosed taxi rank and emerging in a huge car park.
I desperately wanted to get out, so I settled on taking a regular taxi. I walked five minutes to the taxi rank entrance ... and then had to queue for 10 minutes.
I was so tired that I actually almost convinced myself of a conspiracy that the building design was the result of some sort of lobbying by the taxi industry to force people to take cabs.
I thought I was free of the place, but ended up back there with a colleague five days later. This time, I decided it was time to test the mall's app, which uses your location to tell you how to get to particular stores. It worked great ...
... until it didn't. It sometimes just didn't give the proper information, so we had to go to the information screens. There were always queues of lost people waiting to use them, and not nearly enough for the size of the mall.
We ended up in entirely new parts of the mall that I didn't discover last time, including luxury jewelry and watch stores that had closed doors and heavy security.
There were also lots of famous American stores, like Bloomingdale's.
Leaving turned out to be a huge struggle — again. We needed to find a certain hotel connected to the mall to get to the bar on top of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, but neither the app, Google Maps, nor the information screens were any help.
We actually had to ask staff at the concierge service for help twice, and were still a bit confused by what we had to do. We ended up leaving through what appeared to be very fancy entrance to the Fashion Village, which felt like somewhere we absolutely were not supposed to walk through.
Finally, finally we made it outside. It felt like it had been days since I'd actually breathed fresh air. Like all malls, The Dubai Mall is designed to make you forget about the passage of time. And while it had lots of natural light to stop you getting claustrophobic and lots of entertainment options, I still found it totally overwhelming, even when experiencing it for a second time.
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