The Unexpected Al Marjan Island

The first property the Ibiza brand Ushuaïa has opened outside Spain: 319 hotel rooms and 103 residences on the reclaimed Al Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah, a couple of kilometres from the Wynn casino site. Handover is stated for Q4 2026.

Who is building it, and under whose brand

The developer is Almal Real Estate Development, working with Marjan, the government-owned master developer of the island. The brand is Ushuaïa Unexpected Hotels & Residences — the name Spain’s Palladium Hotel Group, owned by the Matutes family, gave its new line in 2024. The stated investment in the property is over $100 million.

The brand itself comes from Ibiza. Ushuaïa Ibiza Beach Hotel is the hotel around which the island’s daytime open-air scene grew: a pool, a stage at the water, residencies by the world’s DJs. Al Marjan is that brand’s first step outside Spain, and the brand is what is being sold here — not the architecture, but a format of holiday the name already stands for.

Two things are worth separating. The hotel operator is Palladium, a company with several dozen hotels behind it. The developer is Almal, a young one. The first answers for the service once the doors open; the second answers for the building being finished on time. They are checked separately.

The brand’s other UAE address is Ushuaïa Dubai Harbour Experience, an open-air venue in the Dubai marina that opened its winter season on 26 October 2024 with Calvin Harris. It was created by Yann Pissenem’s The Night League and Studio A by Addmind — a separate project of the same brand, not part of the Ras Al Khaimah property. It appears on this page only because the two are constantly confused.

What is for sale

The building holds 442 units. Of those, 319 are five-star hotel rooms — standard, junior suites, suites and premium suites. The remaining 103 are private residences: studios and one- to two-bedroom apartments.

These are two different products under one roof, and they should not be confused. A hotel unit is a share in a working hotel: the operator runs it, the return is a function of occupancy, and your own use is normally capped at a set number of nights a year. A residence is an apartment you control yourself, with the hotel’s service attached.

What they share is the ground floor: a beach club, a restaurant, an infinity pool and the water, looking out over the Arabian Gulf. That shared part is the product — on a resort island the amenities are what is bought, and the floor area comes second.

The payment plan the developer quoted at launch is 50/50. Starting prices were published in Q2 2024: from AED 1.6 million for a hotel suite and from AED 1.7 million for a residence. Those are two-year-old figures and should not be read as current — off-plan pricing is revised several times a year. Ask the developer for the price on the date of the deal.

The location: Al Marjan and the Wynn factor

The building stands on Al Marjan — an archipelago of four reclaimed islands covering 2.7 million m² and reaching 4.5 kilometres out to sea. Marjan, the master developer, sells the land in parcels, and the builders on them vary widely. Rixos Bab Al Bahr, DoubleTree by Hilton and Al Marjan Island Hotel & Spa already operate here.

The island’s headline event is Wynn Al Marjan Island, an integrated resort holding the first gaming licence ever issued in the UAE, granted in 2024. The 70-storey tower topped out in December 2025, more than 22,000 people are on site, and the opening is set for September 2027.

That date has moved. On 4 August 2026 Wynn Resorts pushed the launch from March to September 2027 and added $600 million to the budget. For the owner of a unit next door this is not an abstraction: visitor flow, occupancy and nightly rates are all counted from the opening, and six months of slippage is six months of letting at a pre-casino rate.

Which sets the real question for a purchase here: how much of the future growth is already in today’s price. A render does not answer that; a schedule does — what has been built on the neighbouring plots, when the hotels open, what is happening with the roads.

What to check before signing

What you are actually buying. Hotel units and residences sell in the same building at similar prices, but they are different contracts, different rights of use and different economics. Establish which of the two is in your contract first.

The terms of the operator’s rental pool. Hotel units usually come with compulsory management: the fee, how income is split, how many nights a year you may use it yourself, and in which seasons.

The developer and the escrow. Almal is a young company, and the Palladium name on the facade does not answer for construction timing. Look at the completed portfolio, the permits and the escrow account rather than the brand on the render.

The handover date and the remedy for missing it. Q4 2026 is stated; the island’s anchor project has already slipped by six months. What the contract says about a late handover matters more than the date itself.

The yield arithmetic. Any "guaranteed return" on resort rental is the developer’s word, not a fact: we hold no transaction base for Ras Al Khaimah to check it against. Ask for the inputs — occupancy, average rate, operator fee — and run the numbers yourself.

the Almal and Palladium Hotel Group project pages, the Marjan island master plan, and Wynn Resorts’ August 2026 investor call