Inside the $5.1 Billion Wynn Al Marjan Island — the Region’s First Casino Resort

Wynn Al Marjan Island, a $5.1 billion (Dh18.7 billion) resort in Ras Al Khaimah, has entered its final construction phase ahead of an opening targeted for spring 2027. Wynn Resorts has already committed roughly $1.01 billion in equity to the project as of March 2026.

The resort holds particular significance for the region: it is the UAE’s first federally-licensed resort to include gaming, after receiving its commercial gaming facility licence from the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority in October 2024 — making it the first casino resort anywhere in the Gulf.

The scale is substantial. Wynn Al Marjan Island will include 1,530 luxury rooms and suites, 22 dining venues, 12 pools, a 900-seat theatre, a spa, a beach club, a 145,000-square-foot convention centre, a deep-water superyacht marina and 420 metres of private white-sand beach. Construction has already created more than 18,000 jobs, with a dedicated employee village designed to house over 7,000 staff.

For Ras Al Khaimah, the resort anchors a broader transformation of Al Marjan Island into an integrated resort and residential destination — one that developments like RAK Central are being built to support.

The resort is a joint venture between Wynn Resorts, master developer Marjan and RAK Hospitality Holding, with Wynn holding a 40% stake. In February 2026, the partners closed $2.4 billion in construction financing. By that point the tower had already topped out (November 2025), with its exterior façade 83% installed and more than 482,000 cubic metres of concrete and 15,000 tonnes of structural steel poured.

The 1,530 rooms break down into 1,217 resort guestrooms, 297 Enclave suites, two Royal Apartments, four Garden Townhomes and ten Marina Estates — a room mix skewed toward high-end and branded-residence-style inventory. A dedicated 548-metre Wynn Bridge connecting the resort to the mainland is due to open in late 2026, with more than 3,500 food-and-beverage jobs planned across the property.

Sitting roughly 45 minutes from Dubai International Airport, the resort’s construction pace — and the scale of financing already committed — is the clearest evidence yet that Ras Al Khaimah’s transformation into an integrated resort destination is running well ahead of its 2027 opening date. DKey’s agents are already fielding growing interest from investors looking to secure branded residences and rental-ready units on Al Marjan Island ahead of the opening — historically the point at which prices around a project of this scale begin to re-rate.

The $2.4 billion construction financing works out to roughly $1.57 million per room across the full 1,530-key inventory — a per-key figure that sits comfortably within the range integrated resort developers typically target for a five-star, gaming-anchored property, and well above what a standard luxury hotel financing package would carry per room. That gap reflects the added cost of gaming infrastructure, the marina, and the convention centre, all of which need to be operational from day one rather than phased in after opening, since an integrated resort’s economics depend on multiple revenue streams — rooms, gaming, F&B, events — running simultaneously rather than sequentially.

The regulatory milestone matters as much as the construction numbers: gaming licensing in the UAE has historically been treated as a non-starter, so the General Commercial Gaming Regulatory Authority’s October 2024 licence to Wynn Al Marjan Island effectively created an entirely new asset class for the country’s real estate and hospitality sectors rather than simply adding another resort to an existing category. Investors and lenders active in Gulf hospitality real estate are watching this project specifically to see how that regulatory framework performs in practice, since its success or failure will shape whether other emirates pursue similar licensing in the years ahead.

Employee housing at this scale — a purpose-built village for over 7,000 staff — also signals long-term operational planning rather than a project built purely for the opening-week headlines; integrated resorts typically only invest at that level once workforce retention economics have been modelled against a multi-decade operating horizon.

Source of information: Gulf News