The biggest hotel in the world is the First World Hotel in Genting Highlands, Malaysia: 7,351 rooms, a record certified by Guinness World Records. It sits at around 1,800 metres of altitude, an hour from Kuala Lumpur, within the Resorts World Genting complex. Behind it come the giants of Las Vegas, with the Venetian Resort at around 7,000 rooms, and Moscow’s Izmailovo complex.
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First World Hotel: the giant on the mountain
The First World Hotel isn’t where you’d expect. No metropolis, no beach: it sits in the Genting highlands, at around 1,800 metres of altitude, in the heart of the Malaysian jungle, about fifty kilometres from Kuala Lumpur. It’s part of Resorts World Genting, a complex bringing together a casino, theme parks, shopping malls and a cable car running up from the valley.
The figures are record-breaking: 7,351 rooms spread across two multicoloured towers, tens of millions of guests served since opening in 2001, surprisingly low rates, often under €30 a night for a standard room. Guinness World Records first awarded it the title of biggest hotel in the world in 2006, when it had 6,118 rooms; overtaken in 2008 by the expansion of the Venetian in Las Vegas, it reclaimed the record in 2015 after completing the Tower 2 annexe, reaching the current 7,351 rooms.
The philosophy is the exact opposite of made-to-measure luxury: compact, essential rooms, standardised down to the millimetre, designed for a continuous flow of guests who spend the day in the resort and only sleep in the room.
The giants of Las Vegas
The city that industrialised hospitality dominates the rest of the ranking. The Venetian Resort, combining the Venetian and Palazzo towers that operate as a single complex, reaches around 7,000 suites and held the world record for several years. The MGM Grand exceeds 6,800 rooms counting its annexed buildings, and holds another significant record: with around 5,000 rooms in the main building, it’s the biggest hotel in the world housed in a single structure.
In Moscow, the Izmailovo complex, built for the 1980 Olympics, plays in a category of its own: four towers run as separate hotels that together exceed 7,000 rooms. Precisely because they’re separate hotels, Guinness continues to award the title to the First World Hotel.
The ranking of the biggest
| Hotel | Location | Rooms (approx.) | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| First World Hotel | Genting Highlands, Malaysia | 7,351 | Guinness record since 2015 |
| Venetian Resort (with Palazzo) | Las Vegas, USA | 7,000 | Held the record from 2008 to 2015 |
| Izmailovo complex | Moscow, Russia | over 7,000 | Four separate hotels |
| MGM Grand | Las Vegas, USA | 6,850 | The biggest in a single building |
| Sheraton Macao | Macau, China | 4,000 | The biggest hotel in Macau |
And the tallest? The vertical records
Size doesn’t just mean number of rooms. The height record is an all-Dubai derby: the Gevora Hotel, 356 metres and 75 floors on Sheikh Zayed Road, held the title from 2017; the Ciel Dubai Marina, opened in late 2025, overtook it, reaching 377 metres and 82 floors, becoming the tallest hotel in the world. For comparison: Italy’s tallest hotel doesn’t reach a third of those heights, and most Italian hospitality lives in buildings under ten storeys.
Curiously, size records and charm records almost never coincide: the properties that fire up the imagination are often tiny, as the strangest hotels in the world show, from the three apartments in an Amsterdam crane to spheres suspended in Canadian woods.
What’s the biggest hotel in Italy
Italy is the European country with the most hotel beds, but it’s a giant made of dwarfs: the average size of an Italian hotel is around 33 rooms, and properties above 300 rooms can be counted on one hand. Among the biggest is the Ergife Palace Hotel in Rome, with over 700 rooms and one of the capital’s largest conference centres; above 500 rooms you’ll find only a handful of other conference hotels in Rome and Milan and some resort villages in the South.
It’s a structural difference, not a lag: the Italian model grew out of historic buildings, family-run guesthouses and seasonally driven regions, not thousand-room property developments. That’s why the typical Italian design brief isn’t “how do I manage 7,000 identical rooms” but “how do I make 30 completely different rooms recognisable and profitable”.
The logistics of furnishing thousands of rooms
Behind the First World Hotel’s numbers lies a challenge that fascinates anyone working in contract furnishing: how do you furnish 7,351 rooms? The answer is one word: standardisation. A handful of room types repeated thousands of times, a single set of finishes, furniture designed for rapid installation and component replacement, work organised by entire floors with teams moving forward like a vertical assembly line.
Across thousands of identical pieces, every euro shaved off a single item becomes millions by the end of the project, which is why the Asian and American giants work with rigid specifications and interchangeable components: one thickness, one set of fittings, one front panel, repeated across whole buildings. Then there’s timing. A phased renovation with the property staying open requires every room to be back on sale within a few days, and the sequence of stripping out, works and installation is planned in advance, with the booking calendar on the table; installing furniture in a hotel that stays open is decided there, weeks before teams enter a room.
With 7,000 rooms, the cost item that matters comes after the purchase, and it’s maintenance over the following decade. Fittings, worktops and fronts have to remain identically available for that entire period, because replacing a chipped door with a panel of a slightly different shade, multiplied across a few hundred rooms, means redoing the whole floor.
The principle of the standard room type also applies at Italian scale: for a 30-room hotel, supplying complete rooms as a coordinated stock replicates the giants’ logic on a small scale, a single design and coordinated components, with more predictable timing and pricing than buying piece by piece.
What an Italian hotel can learn from the giants
The scale is different, the method transfers. First: designing the standard room once and repeating it, adapting it to different floor areas, cuts costs and errors; furniture production times shorten considerably when the supply chain works on coherent series rather than disconnected one-off pieces. Second: the budget should be built per room, not per individual piece of furniture, as we explain in the guide on how much it costs to furnish a hotel. Third: standardisation isn’t the enemy of identity. As a contract partner we coordinate a selected supply chain of Italian workshops precisely to bring the two worlds together: the industrial repeatability of the standard room and the made-to-measure work that adapts that room to a historic building, an attic, an irregular structure.
The First World Hotel shows that hospitality can work as an industry; the story of the oldest hotel in the world, which has had only a few dozen rooms for thirteen centuries, shows it can also work as the exact opposite.
Frequently asked questions
How many rooms does the biggest hotel in the world have?
The First World Hotel in Genting Highlands, Malaysia, has 7,351 rooms spread across two towers and is certified by Guinness World Records as the biggest hotel in the world. It had already held the record in 2006 with 6,118 rooms and reclaimed it in 2015 after expanding its second tower.
What’s the biggest hotel in Italy?
Italy has no giants with thousands of rooms: the national average is around 33 rooms per property. Among the biggest is the Ergife Palace Hotel in Rome, with over 700 rooms and one of the capital’s largest conference centres; only a handful of other conference properties and some resort villages exceed 500 rooms.
What’s the tallest hotel in the world?
The Ciel Dubai Marina, opened in late 2025 in Dubai: 377 metres tall with 82 floors. It overtook the Gevora Hotel, also in Dubai, which at 356 metres had held the record since 2017.
Why is the First World Hotel so cheap?
Because its business model isn’t the room, it’s the resort: guests spend on the casino, theme parks and restaurants of Resorts World Genting, and the compact, standardised rooms exist to bring in footfall. A standard room can cost under €30 a night, among the lowest rates in the world for a hotel of that size.
How much staff does a hotel with thousands of rooms need?
The giants of Las Vegas and Genting employ several thousand people per property, with housekeeping departments organised like genuine cleaning factories: teams per floor, round-the-clock shifts and linen stores measured in tonnes. As a benchmark, the industry estimates 0.5 to 1 staff member per room in full-service properties, so a 7,000-room hotel needs a workforce comparable to a large industrial company.
