The owner of the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas plans on exporting the lost-city brand to the Middle East by building an equally grandiose hotel in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.<\/P><\/p>\n
Dubai’s Atlantis will rise on a man-made, palm-tree-shaped island and mark Kerzner International’s first attempt at creating a chain of Atlantis destinations modeled after its successful Nassau resort.<\/P><\/p>\n
The new $650 million project — to be called Atlantis, The Palm — would emphasize the same underwater and over-the-top atmosphere of the original resort, including a massive aquarium and water park, and two ornate towers linked by a bridge of ultra-luxury hotel rooms.<\/P><\/p>\n
Kerzner is considering bringing Atlantis resorts to Europe and Asia in the same way Disney exported its theme parks to Tokyo and Paris, said company President Butch Kerzner.<\/P><\/p>\n
“We’ve been looking in the past two years to find some other venue to build another Atlantis and take the brand more globally,” Kerzner revealed in a telephone interview.<\/P><\/p>\n
The Bahamas-based company operates hotels and casinos around the world, including one in the United Arab Emirates. Atlantis, The Palm will be a joint venture with the Dubai government, which has spent billions of dollars attracting visitors to the Persian Gulf state and now has one of the world’s fastest-growing tourism economies.<\/P><\/p>\n
The 1,000-room Atlantis will sit on one of two islands three miles into the gulf that Dubai is creating from scratch to resemble palm trees with more than a dozen fronds. The $1.5 billion project will increase Dubai’s beachfront by 75 percent.<\/P><\/p>\n
The Middle East has long attracted vacationers from Europe and Asia who are drawn by balmy climates and relatively short flying times — about six or eight hours either way, said Scott Berman, a hotel analyst for PricewaterhouseCoopers in Miami.<\/P><\/p>\n
Kerzner will market the Dubai Atlantis to Europeans and Asians, leaving the Bahamas Atlantis to cater to the North American market, Kerzner said.<\/P><\/p>\n
The 75-acre Atlantis, The Palm will have a water park twice the size of the one in Nassau, Kerzner said, but no casino, since gambling is illegal in Dubai.<\/P><\/p>\n
The Dubai resort could grow to 2,000 rooms, the company said in a press release. That would leave it smaller than the original, which has 2,300 rooms now and plans on adding another 1,200 in a $600 million expansion already underway. And last week, Kerzner announced it was buying the neighboring Club Med in Nassau.<\/P><\/p>\n
In the interview, Kerzner said the company will limit the Atlantis franchise to a few mega-resort destinations centered on water parks.<\/P><\/p>\n
“The last thing we would ever do is put Atlantis on a 300-room hotel,” he said.<\/P><\/p>\n
By Douglas Hanks III, The Miami Herald
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The hotel in Dubai is just a start, as the chain follows Disney’s lead in an attempt to create a global vacation brand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244046\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}