The World’s Biggest Hotels and Their Relationship With Casinos
A hotel’s primary function is lodging, and a casino’s role is facilitating gambling games. In Las Vegas, the two intertwine into one. Five of the world’s biggest hotels are in Nevada’s premier city. However, the list of the world’s biggest casinos looks different to the list of its biggest hotels.
The Londoner Macau is a casino and resort on the Cotai Strip. Its hotel has 5,989 rooms, making it one of the biggest in the world. ©Hugo F.H.C.
Topping the ‘big hotels’ chart, based on the number of rooms, is a hotel you have probably never heard of, situated in a country you would not associate with gambling. Join us as we look at the world’s top ten hotels – including the table-topping 7,351-room monster – and consider their relationship with casino gambling.
10. Luxor Las Vegas
With 4,407 rooms, Luxor Las Vegas scrapes into the top 10 ahead of Thailand’s Ambassador City, Jomtien. The pyramid-shaped and ancient Egyptian-themed venue opened in 1993 when it stood 30 stories high and featured 39,000 windows (13 acres of glass). It is one of the most significant metal-and-glass projects ever constructed.
Within a few years of the Luxor’s opening, a $300 million renovation and expansion program began. The changes included two additional hotel towers – that were conventionally shaped – which added to the hotel’s capacity considerably.
The venue currently boasts 65,214 square feet of gambling space. Its immensely popular LAX nightclub opened in 2007 and closed a decade later. It was replaced with the Las Vegas Strip’s first Esports arena,[1] which has regularly doubled as a venue for the final tables of valuable World Poker Tour events.
9. Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Four thousand four hundred and twenty-six rooms put Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay into the ninth spot in the ‘largest hotel’ standings. A Y-shape design – like other Las Vegas hotels, Treasure Island, Monte Carlo, and currently refurbing Mirage – Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino opened in 1999 on the former site of the Hacienda Hotel (1956-1996).
Mandalay Bay has had four renovations since its opening. The first was in 2003, the same year Delano Las Vegas (originally called THEhotel) opened within the Mandalay Bay grounds. This 43-story luxury suite hotel added 1,118 rooms to the complex,[2] putting Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in the world’s top 10. Its customers have 147,992 square feet of gambling space to choose from.
8. Barkhatnye Sezony
Sochi’s Barkhatnye Sezony has 4,688 rooms. The city is situated on the Sochi River, along the Black Sea in Southern Russia and entered the public’s psyche in 2014 when staging the Winter Olympics. Sochi has since hosted Formula 1’s Russian Grand Prix (from 2014 until 2021) and was a host city for the 2018 FIFA World Cup.[3]
Sochi has been Russia’s unofficial summer capital since the 1960s. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has hit overseas visiting numbers dramatically. Those who stay in Barkhatnye Sezony can visit the nearby luxurious Casino Sochi, which has over 450 slots, table games, and a vibrant poker room which has hosted eight PokerStars European Poker Tour events.
7. Wynn Las Vegas & Encore Resort
At $2.7 billion, Wynn Las Vegas was the most expensive resort ever built when it opened in 2005. By comparison, Wynn’s Bellagio, which opened seven years beforehand, cost $1.6 billion. 2,716 was Wynn Las Vegas’s initial room count, and its guests had 111,000 square feet of cleverly designed casino space to play in.
Like the Luxor and Mandalay Bay, a sister property, Encore Las Vegas, had to be added to give ‘The Wynn’ top-10 status. It opened in December 2008, and this second 4-star hotel tower saw the complex’s gaming space increase to 188,786 square feet and the room count become 4,748. In 2023, Forbes described the venue as “America’s Most Awarded Resort”.[4]
Built on the former site of the Desert Inn, the Las Vegas Wynne is one of Las Vegas’s most luxurious hotels. ©Almc1217
6. Izmailovo Hotel
Built for the 1980 Olympic Games, Moscow’s Izmailovo Hotel surpassed another Moscow venue, the Rossiya Hotel (1967–2006), to become the world’s biggest hotel and kept the mantle until 1993. With 5,000 rooms, it remains Europe’s biggest hotel.
The Izmailovsky Hotel complex comprises of four high-rise buildings: ‘Alfa’, ‘Beta’, ‘Vega’, and ‘Gamma/Delta’. Casino gambling is currently illegal in Moscow (and most of Russia), but Central Moscow Hippodrome races three and four days a week for much of the year and has tote betting.
5. The Londoner Macao
The Londoner Macao is a casino and resort on the Cotai Strip in boomtown Macau. Originally named Cotai Strip parcels 5 and 6, the first portion of this $4 billion resort opened in April 2012 and featured a four-star Holiday Inn. It was the world’s largest Holiday Inn, with over 1,200 rooms.
The second phase – the twin-towered five-star Sheraton Macao Hotel, Cotai Central – opened in September 2012. With 4,001 rooms, this Sheraton was both the largest hotel in Macau and the largest Sheraton in the world. Three years later, a fourth tower, the St. Regis Macao, Cotai Central, opened.
The entire complex was re-branded as The Londoner Macao in early 2021 and ‘London-themed’ attractions have been introduced ever since.[5] They include a Houses of Parliament facade and a life-sized Big Ben. Six hotels now make up The Londoner Macao and its total of 5,989 rooms.
As for Macau, the tiny former Portuguese colony that measures just 12.7 square miles attracts over 30 million tourists a year. Gambling is its biggest attraction by far, and while figures remain below pre-pandemic levels, Macau’s gross gambling revenue for 2023 was $22.3 billion, almost three times that of the running hot Las Vegas Strip.[6]
4. The Clock Towers
Las Vegas and Macau may be a Mecca for gamblers, but The Clock Towers, formerly known as Abraj Al Bait, is something altogether different. This enormous Saudi Arabian hotel complex is just 300 metres away from the world’s largest mosque and Islam’s most sacred site, the Great Mosque of Mecca. Its primary purpose is to serve pilgrims during the Hajj.
Hajj is a mandatory religious duty for Muslims that must be carried out by all adult Muslims – who are physically and financially capable of undertaking the journey – at least once during their lifetime. The five-or-six-day pilgrimage attracts a ballpark two million people annually.
The Clock Tower’s 6,000 rooms do not make it the world’s biggest hotel, but its complex of seven skyscrapers does hold numerous records. Opened in 2012 following a ten-year build, its $15 billion cost makes it the world’s most expensive building. The central hotel tower, the Makkah Clock Royal Tower, is the fourth-tallest building in the world.[7]
3. MGM Grand Las Vegas
6,852 rooms see Las Vegas’ MGM Grand sit third on the list. The Las Vegas property, which opened in 1993, lays claim to the world’s largest single hotel building, which contains 5,124 of the MGM’s total rooms on 30 floors. The hotel also boasts five outdoor pools, rivers and waterfalls that cover 6.6 acres. Interestingly, MGM Resorts became the first gambling operator to sign onto the United Nations’ CEO Water Mandate in 2023.
On opening, the resort boasted the world’s largest casino, measuring 171,500 square feet, containing 3,500 slot machines and 165 table games. The space set aside for gambling within MGM Grand has changed very little; remarkably, no Las Vegas casino currently sits in the world’s top 10 of ‘gaming space’.
2. The Venetian Resort
Like other properties on this list, The Venetian – built on land previously occupied by the Sands Hotel and Casino – has gradually grown and grown. It started with 3,036 suites in a 35-story tower that opened in May 1999. A 12-story building, the Venezia, was completed in 2003 and took the room count to 4,049.
The Palazzo, a sister property with its own hotel and casino, opened north of the Venetian in 2008 costing $1.9 billion.[8] If considered to be a single property – and they operate as one hotel – the Venetian-Palazzo complex combines to rank as the second-largest hotel in the world, with approximately 7,100 rooms.
The Venetian was built to accommodate convention-goers in particular. As a result, only 120,000 square feet of ground space were dedicated to gambling. The Palazzo has added an additional 105,000 square feet to the Venetian Resort’s gambling area. In August 2024, the largest poker room on the Las Vegas Strip opened at the Venetian Hotel Casino.[9] It is 14,000 square feet and features 50 live dealer tables, each with USB charging ports.
1. First World Hotel
Remarkably, not only doesn’t Las Vegas have the biggest casino, but it also does not have the largest hotel. Since 2015, this distinction has belonged to First World Hotel in Malaysia, situated in Genting Highlands, a hill resort and major entertainment destination 50 kilometres north of Kuala Lumpur.
Better known for quantity rather than luxury, the 3-star First World Hotel currently has 7,351 rooms. It had topped the Guinness World Records title for the largest hotel in 2006, with 6,118 rooms in two towers. A third tower block opened in 2015, adding an additional 1,233 rooms and returned it to the top of the charts.
Genting Highlands is the only place in Malaysia where casinos are legal. However, in February 2024, two of the three casinos in the resort – Genting Casino 1 (Circus Palace) and Genting Casino 2 (Hollywood) – closed. The newest, Sky Casino, remains. It is spread over two levels housing 400 electronic tables, 3,000 slot machines, plus traditional table games such as roulette and blackjack.
In September 2024, Fortune reported that “Genting Group’s revenue for leisure and hospitality in Malaysia reached 6.42 billion ringgit ($1.4 billion) in 2023, with a large part of it coming from gaming revenue.” Genting also has interests across the world including land-based casinos and an online casino in the UK.
The article outlined that the rising influence of Islamic parties in Malaysia could lead to the closure of Sky Casino, particularly if Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) – part of an opposition coalition that controls four of Malaysia’s 13 states – captures the state of Pahang (Genting casino’s home) in the next general election which must be held by early 2028.
- Luxor transforming closed LAX nightclub into e-sports arena, (April 11, 2017), Las Vegas Sun. Associated Press, Retrieved September 17, 2024.
- New tower, THEhotel, opens at Strip resort, (December 19, 2003), Las Vegas Business Press, Retrieved September 18, 2024.
- World Cup 2018: Sochi joins world’s elite sporting cities, (June 15, 2018), BBC Sport, Retrieved September 23, 2024.
- America’s Most Awarded Resort: Inside Wynn Las Vegas, (July 24, 2023), Forbes, Retrieved September 21, 2024.
- Big Ben and Beckham: Macao’s newest resort, The Londoner, is a shrine to all things British, (January 5, 2021), CNN Travel, Retrieved September 22, 2024.
- Macau bounces back as casinos adapt to two ‘new normals’, (February 9, 2024), Finance Asia, Retrieved September 23, 2024.
- Tallest Buildings, Sky Scraper Center, Retrieved September 22, 2024.
- What went right, wrong and what’s still incomplete at the new Palazzo, (January 21, 2008), Las Vegas Sun, Retrieved September 23, 2024.
- Venetian ups ante with new poker room, largest on Strip, (August 3, 2024), Las Vegas Review-Journal, Retrieved September 15, 2024.
