Building a casino resort in a country that’s never had one requires a specific kind of leader, someone who’s actually run gaming operations at scale, not just luxury hospitality generally. Wynn Al Marjan Island’s two most senior executives, President Max Tappeiner and Chief Operating Officer Tom Roelens, both fit that description, though they arrive at it from meaningfully different backgrounds. Together, their combined resumes tell you a lot about how Wynn intends to actually run this property once it opens, not just how it plans to market it.
Max Tappeiner: A Career Built Inside the Rooms He’s Now Designing
Tappeiner took over as president of Wynn Al Marjan Island in September 2024, arriving with a resume built almost entirely around opening and operating major gaming properties rather than general luxury hospitality. Before Ras Al Khaimah, he spent years as Executive Vice President of Operations at Wynn Las Vegas itself, giving him direct, senior-level experience running one of the most scrutinized and heavily regulated casino floors in the world.
That Vegas experience sits on top of an earlier career that reads like a tour through the industry’s biggest gaming operators: leadership roles at The Venetian and Resorts World Las Vegas, both major integrated resort casinos, following formative years with Mandarin Oriental across Munich, London, and Washington DC and flagship property openings in New York and Las Vegas. He holds an executive MBA from the Royal University of Melbourne. Notably, almost every major stop on Tappeiner’s resume prior to Ras Al Khaimah involved an actual gaming floor, not adjacent luxury hospitality without a casino component. For a market building its first legal gambling operation from zero, hiring a president whose entire career has been spent inside working casinos, rather than someone from purely five-star hotel or resort management, is a specific and telling choice.
Tom Roelens: The UAE Market Knowledge Tappeiner Doesn’t Have
Where Tappeiner brings deep gaming operations experience, Chief Operating Officer Tom Roelens brings something arguably just as critical for this specific project: direct, senior-level experience in the UAE hospitality market itself. Before joining Wynn, Roelens served as Managing Director at Atlantis The Royal and Senior Vice President of Atlantis Dubai, two of the most prominent luxury resort properties in the entire country, giving him firsthand knowledge of exactly the guest expectations, operational challenges, and market dynamics Wynn Al Marjan Island will need to navigate as a new entrant.
That regional experience sits on top of a genuinely global career, including 20 years at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts across Malaysia, Lanai in Hawaii, the Maldives, Indonesia, and California, plus formative training in Michelin-starred fine dining kitchens in Belgium and France, a hospitality degree from Ter Groene Poorte in Bruges, and postgraduate study in public relations and media management at Ghent University, followed by executive education at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration covering hospitality finance, strategic management, and hotel real estate investment.
Roelens currently serves a second term on the Standards Advisory Committee of Forbes Travel Guide representing the Middle East and Africa region, and sits on the Industry Advisory Board of the Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management, positions that put him in direct, ongoing contact with the exact standards bodies and regional hospitality networks Wynn will need to satisfy and integrate with as it opens.
Why the Combination Matters More Than Either Résumé Alone
Pairing these two specific backgrounds isn’t an accident. Tappeiner supplies the gaming-specific operational expertise that a market with zero prior casino history genuinely needs at the top, someone who has actually run a Wynn casino floor before, not just a luxury resort generally. Roelens supplies the regional market fluency that expertise alone can’t replace, someone who already understands what UAE luxury travelers expect, because he’s spent years directly serving them at some of the country’s most prominent resorts.
That division of expertise reflects a real challenge specific to this project. Most new casino market entries happen in places with at least some existing gaming infrastructure or regulatory precedent to build on. The UAE has neither. Leadership here can’t simply import a standard Wynn playbook wholesale, the way opening a new property in an established gaming market like Macau or New Jersey might allow. It also can’t rely purely on regional hospitality experience without genuine casino operations expertise at the top, given how much regulatory and operational complexity a licensed gaming floor actually introduces. Having one executive who’s spent his career specifically inside gaming operations, and another who’s spent his career specifically inside this exact regional market, covers both gaps simultaneously rather than betting everything on one type of expertise.
What This Leadership Structure Signals About the Property Itself
For anyone trying to gauge how seriously Wynn is taking the operational side of this project, rather than just the architectural or marketing side, the leadership team is arguably a better signal than the tower height or the room count. A resort president whose entire prior career centered on running actual casino floors, paired with a chief operating officer whose prior roles were specifically inside the UAE’s own luxury hospitality market, suggests a genuine effort to get both halves of this unusual equation right simultaneously: gaming credibility and regional market fluency, rather than importing one at the expense of the other.
Whether that leadership combination translates into a smoothly run property once Wynn Al Marjan Island actually opens is something that won’t be clear until real guests start walking through the doors. But the hiring pattern itself, gaming operations expertise at the top paired with deep UAE market knowledge directly beneath it, suggests Wynn understood exactly what kind of leadership this specific market required, and built accordingly.
