Nevada embraced tourism because of a paucity of their development options. So, if you’re in a small emirate who wants to lessen its dependence on oil exports, it might be a model to follow. Dubai seems intent on doing do, minus the gambling. From CNN:
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 neighbors plough record oil revenues into new mega-projects to try to emulate Dubai’s success in weaning its economy off energy exports.
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 center piece 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.
Dubai is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure and real estate developments and is already home to an estimated 17 percent of the world’s cranes.
Dubai plans world’s largest hotel, $27 bln resort – May. 1, 2006
Asia Asia is not the most interesting name for a hotel I’ve heard lately. I wonder if it will be vaguely themed around the continent of Asia, taking in elements from the Ural Mountains to Indonesia. With 6,500 rooms, they’ll have plenty of space.