UAE first casino confirmed, to be bigger than Las Vegas: Report
The casino will be at the upcoming Wynn Marjan
The Wynn Marjan in Ras Al Khaimah will be home to the UAE’s first casino, Arabian Business’ sister publication Hotelier Middle East reported Thursday.
Ras Al Khaimah is currently writing gaming laws for the casino, using Singaporean and US regulations as its foundation, according to Hotelier, with the Wynn Marjan planning its casino operations in the emirate.
“We certainly don’t want to underbuild the casino,” Wynn Resorts CEO Craig Billings in the group’s Q3 2022 earning call this week, Hotelier reported. “The casino component, where at least for some period of time, we will be operating on our own, which makes it quite exciting is shaping up to be somewhat larger than Wynn Las Vegas, but with numerous pockets of energy and compression.”Wynn Marjan, which is set to open in 2026 in Ras Al Khaimah, will be home to a casino around 18,500 sqm in size, according to Billings.
According to Hotelier, this would make it one of the 10 biggest casinos in the world, and almost double the size of Wynn’s Vegas property.
According to the Q3 earnings call, Wynn is putting a high amount of focus on the project, with Billings noting that the project has “a very high return opportunity for us we expect. And so, that’s really the focus of our design and development efforts at the moment.”
The resort will be located on Dream Island, an unused area on Ras Al Khaimah’s Marjan Island. It will be the sole resort on Dream Island.
Development plans for Al Marjan seen by Hotelier Middle East have confirmed that the area will be home to the ‘Wynn Integrated Resort’.
The emirate’s tourism development authority has already created a division specifically for regulating integrated resorts, with a new Department of Entertainment and Gaming Regulation also set up to “consider the social, cultural, and environmental landscape of the emirate and cover licensing, taxation, operational procedures, and consumer safeguards,” according to RAKTDA.
“The foremost priority of this new division is to create a robust framework that will ensure responsible gaming at all levels,” a statement from RAKTDA read at the time.
