When the government announced the plan, it met with opposition from many sides. There are many reasons for opposition. For example, the new airport will be 70 kilometers away from downtown Kuala Lumpur, which is very inconvenient. The whole plan is very expensive and so on. In addition, some people think that Subang International Airport still has room for expansion and there is no need to build a new airport. When the project started construction, Subang International Airport was building the third terminal, which was put into use on February 20 10. In addition, 1995 also carried out maintenance and upgrading of the second passenger terminal building.
After several years of planning, Kuala Lumpur International Airport finally officially started operation on June 27th, 1998, one week ahead of the newly-built Hong Kong International Airport. At the beginning of the opening of the airport, there was chaos. The computer in the passenger terminal was broken, but the flight information could not be displayed. There was a problem with baggage delivery for more than five hours.
When the airport was put into use, it was also the recovery period of the Asian financial turmoil, so few people arrived at this airport and airports in the region, resulting in losses in the performance of airlines. As a result, several airlines also stopped flying to Kuala Lumpur, such as All Nippon Airways, British Airways, Qantas and Northwest Airlines.
In March 2006, AirAsia's low-cost passenger terminal began to open. In order to cope with more and more passengers, this passenger terminal is specially built for low-cost airline AirAsia, so as to achieve the purpose of "cheapness", so that passengers of low-cost airlines only need to pay cheap airport taxes.