The Wynn Marjan in Ras Al Khaimah will house the country’s first casino, according to a Thursday report from Arabian Business’ sister journal Hotelier Middle East.
According to Hotelier, Ras Al Khaimah is now drafting gaming rules for the casino using Singaporean and US regulations as its model. Wynn Marjan is also preparing to open a casino 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.”
According to Billings, the casino at Wynn Marjan, which is scheduled to open in Ras Al Khaimah in 2026, would be about 18,500 square meters in size.
According to Hotelier, this would nearly treble the size of Wynn’s Las Vegas resort and making it one of the top 10 largest casinos in the world.
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.”
On Dream Island, an unused area of Ras Al Khaimah’s Marjan Island, the resort will be situated. It will be Dream Island’s only resort.
According to development plans for Al Marjan obtained by Hotelier Middle East, the region will house 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.
News Courtesy: Arabian Business