It’s from that frame of reference that I can say that the Petronas towers of KL, the whole experienced considered, pretty much sucked. Here’s why…

So first, the tower is an extremely popular tourist activity, as you’d expect. If you’re planning a trip, prepare to go EARLY in the morning to have any chance of seeing it that day. A queue for tickets begins at 9am and the tours stop at about 1pm (from memory). So if the tickets up until 1pm are sold, you can only buy them for the following day.

So a decent strategy if you REALLY want to see the towers is just to go and commit 2 hours of your day in a queue but book a ticket for the following day so that the NEXT day when your tour’s on, you can just come and walk through. Even that way, there’s a bunch of reasons why I don’t advise it.

So you get to the actual tour…

The towers are of course extremely tall, and the city of KL is beautiful at night, BUT, the tour you go on that you wait all that time in line for… it doesn’t even take you to the top of the building! You stop at the connecting bridge which is, I
don’t think even 2/3’s of the way to the top!

Furthermore, what time you do have at the level of the connecting bridge is extremely short! They’re rushing people through so fast that you get about 10 minutes to walk along the sky bridge between the towers, the view from which is largely blocked by the towers being on either side (it’s nothing like a 360 degree view) and then you’re hustled back into the elevator.

Couple this with the borderline insulting propaganda film about the amazing works of the Petronas company that you have to watch before going up the tower (which now that I think of it, was about as long as your time on the sky bridge) and you can basically call the KL tower experience a waste of time, in light that is, of all of the other cool things to do around the city of KL.

At the end of the day I’m not going to say we HATED the experience but when we got back down, we were certainly a little disappointed.

All of that said, what you SHOULD do at the KL towers is go for a walk on the blocks around them at night, because lit up, they do look very cool. But you’ll almost certainly do that while you’re in KL regardless.

This one is a “don’t recommend” my friends. Even if you want to get a high view of the city, the other tower in KL with the revolving restaurant will almost surely provide a more pleasant experience.

Enjoy!

Author: Andrew Hansen