KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - When I last visited KL, nearly 10 years ago, the city seemed like a garden. Looking out from more than, say, 10 stories up, one saw a canopy of green tropical trees. Many of the trees are still there, but as evidenced from SkyBar, the breezy rooftop bar on the 33rd floor of Traders Hotel, the city has recently sprouted a forest of new highrise buildings.
There are, of course, the brilliant Petronas twin towers - 88 floors high, shaped like two electronic wands or twin ziggurats, connected at the 41st floor by an enclosed metal-and-glass walkway. Since I last visited, the towers have gained some company. Not least is SkyBar itself - graced by spectacular views and cooled by a swimming pool that runs down the center of the space. It draws a hip crowd of spiky-haired individuals at night, hotel guests splashing about in the water by day. Traders, coolly stylish and very well-appointed business hotel, opened in January 2006, and is joined at the hip to the 2-year-old Kuala Lumpur Convention Center. A vacant lot far down below is set to become a Four Seasons Hotel. Also nearby is another high-end hotel, the Mandarin Oriental, also a highrise.
But if development has changed the face of central KL, there are still many trees, some with bright, flaming flowers. The tall buildings near Traders surround a small but fine green park and small lake. Families stroll there on weekends and the occasional hardy jogger, plugging away in KL's smothering tropical heat, is also to be seen.
Me, I relaxed over chicken satays and duck egg rolls with a Tiger beer, watching the city lights come on. A DJ was scheduled to spin and scratch later that night, but I didn't stay to see the place morph into a trendy club, which it does in the wee hours. And not solely for Traders guests -SkyBar is a popular destination in its own right. It was enough to chill out with a drink and watch the nightime haze swirling between the Petronas towers. I half-expected the Batman logo to materialize, projected on the nighttime sky. Maybe with another drink.
Showing posts with label Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Show all posts
Monday, June 8, 2009
Simplifying Air Travel
KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - The cascade of glum financial news continued at the world's biggest civil aviation conference, on today's second and closing day.
Airline and airport executives, execs at industry vendors such as Airbus and Boeing and several hundred presslings - that's us journalists - heard insiders such as JetBlue Airways CEO David Barger say the New York carrier will take delivery of only three new planes this year, down from the 36 it thought it was ordering until recently. Blame the global economy for that.
But while the numbers are still bad in the travel business and well beyond it, innovations that will change the way we travel continue to be developed, recession or no.
One of the pet projects of the International Air Transport Association - holding its big annual general meeting here in Malaysia's capital -is called simplfying the business. This initiative led to the near-total disappearance of paper tickets in recent years, in favor of electronic tickets. That saved the airlines a bundle of money, and deeply cut back the use of paper - for them, anyway. Travelers, of course, still use paper when we print out our e-tickets.
Now, particpating airlines are promoting the use of airport kiosks to read two-dimensional check-in bar codes sent to travelers' mobile phones and even kiosks to self-tag your checked bags rather than have an airline employee do it. A prototype of this futuristic form of air travel has gone live at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where it is in the early stages of testing by the public. Look for much more of this in years to come as automated and tightly integrated systems are rolled out in the world's busiest airports.
The thing these innovations have got in commom is that they encourage and enable travelers to Do It Yourself. That saves the airlines money - they don't have to pay employees to perform these tasks - and if the new systems work as advertised, they will save you a lot of time when you travel, cutting the precious minutes you have to spend in line.
Airline and airport executives, execs at industry vendors such as Airbus and Boeing and several hundred presslings - that's us journalists - heard insiders such as JetBlue Airways CEO David Barger say the New York carrier will take delivery of only three new planes this year, down from the 36 it thought it was ordering until recently. Blame the global economy for that.
But while the numbers are still bad in the travel business and well beyond it, innovations that will change the way we travel continue to be developed, recession or no.
One of the pet projects of the International Air Transport Association - holding its big annual general meeting here in Malaysia's capital -is called simplfying the business. This initiative led to the near-total disappearance of paper tickets in recent years, in favor of electronic tickets. That saved the airlines a bundle of money, and deeply cut back the use of paper - for them, anyway. Travelers, of course, still use paper when we print out our e-tickets.
Now, particpating airlines are promoting the use of airport kiosks to read two-dimensional check-in bar codes sent to travelers' mobile phones and even kiosks to self-tag your checked bags rather than have an airline employee do it. A prototype of this futuristic form of air travel has gone live at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where it is in the early stages of testing by the public. Look for much more of this in years to come as automated and tightly integrated systems are rolled out in the world's busiest airports.
The thing these innovations have got in commom is that they encourage and enable travelers to Do It Yourself. That saves the airlines money - they don't have to pay employees to perform these tasks - and if the new systems work as advertised, they will save you a lot of time when you travel, cutting the precious minutes you have to spend in line.
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