Dubai plans world's largest hotel

DUBAI (Reuters) — Dubai is planning to build the world's largest hotel as part of a $27 billion resort project unveiled on Monday to spearhead the Gulf emirate's drive to become a global tourism hub.

Promotional video of the Bawadi project showed a 10 km (6.2 miles) long resort strip that resembled Las Vegas without the casinos — its 31 hotels modelled on ancient Egyptian palaces, Hollywood, London's Houses of Parliament and even the moon.

Dubai's fantastic, even bizarre developments, including a ski slope in the desert and man-made islands shaped like palm fronds, helped draw some 6 million tourists last year to a tiny desert land that is fast running out of oil.

Dubai hopes to make that 15 million tourists a year over the next decade even as its richer neighbours plough record oil revenues into new mega-projects to try to emulate Dubai's success in weaning its economy off energy exports.

"The launch of this project effectively signals the next major phase in tourism development in Dubai as we look forward to the next eight years of major growth," said Saeed al-Muntafiq, chief executive of Tatweer, the Dubai government-owned project developer.

Muntafiq said at the launch ceremony that Dubai, one of seven members of the oil-exporting United Arab Emirates, would need to build 70,000-80,000 new hotel rooms over the next decade to meet its expansion plans.

Bawadi will have more than 29,000 hotel rooms, nearly double the number now available in Dubai, and will be able to host more than 3 million tourists by 2016.

The centrepiece of the resort will be the 6,500-room Asia Asia Hotel which Tatweer says will be the largest in the world. The MGM Grand Las Vegas, now the largest hotel in the world, has 5,044 rooms.

The first phase of the project, which includes the Asia Asia hotel, will be operational by 2010.

Tatweer will invest 40 billion dirhams ($10.9 billion) in the project, building the Asia Asia and Bawadi's infrastructure, Muntafiq said. The rest of the money will come from investors.

"We have been talking to several leading names in the (leisure) industry and they have all expressed strong interest," Muntafiq told reporters, declining to name any potential investors.

He said Tatweer had no plans to issue either debt or equity to raise its share of the investment.

Dubai is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and real estate developments and is already home to an estimated 17% of the world's cranes.

Other governments in the world's biggest oil exporting region are following suit and more than $1 trillion worth of infrastructure projects are in the pipeline across the region.