Malls – The Marina Mall – OMR – No Play area – Autism Spectrum Disorder

Hi All,

we went to Marina Mall couple of months back, thinking that every bigger Malls have a play area hence this should have one…But we were disappointed. The place is newly opened up, it is scheduled to have a play area constructed, however they are still in the planning stage.

Marina Mall is located in the OMR, exact address is “The Marina Mall, Old Mahabalipuram Road, Egatoor, Navalur, Chennai, Tamil Nadu 603103”. It is open on all days, typical mall working hours i.e. 10 am to 11 pm. This place is known for its INOX Cinemas and SPAR Hyper Market, apart from that few branded showrooms were available.

Even though they did not have a dedicated Play area or Arcade area like funcity, they had below activities :

1) Iron man kind of a robot where your kid can sit and ride using controls in the robot. I think for 3 rounds it costs 200 rs per person.

2) There was a section in the ground floor where kids can play with toy jeeps for free organized by Hot Wheels. You have to enter the name in the registry that is all. Not sure if it was a permanent setup or a temporary one …

3) In second floor i guess, there was a Virtual game place, where your kid put on a VR glass and decide on the game they wanted to play. They had 3 different rides like a boat setup, riding an horse setup etc . This gives a good sensory input to them.

The place has a decent parking place, good food court etc ….

For kids, this place is no good…they can spend a max of 15 mins in the activities i mentioned above. Even the Spar hypermarket is not fully loaded, the kids toys section had very few collections ….

I will post the review once they open up a play area in this mall .. until then it is not worth to visit a place so far outside the city for the sake of few VR games and a robot ride.

Few pics we took during our visit are: