Inside Wynn Al Marjan Island with Max Tappeiner, President

I feel great, Roseman. Thank you.

Thank you, Roseman. I really appreciate this opportunity. Excited to speak with you. I was born into this industry. My mother and my father worked at a hotel in Munich and that's where they met. My brother and I at a very young age spent all of our holidays and New Year's Eve celebrations on property in a tuxedo in a grand ballroom with guests and dignitaries. So at a very young age, I was exposed to hospitality and the passion that it takes to run a luxury hotel. As we got a little older, my father asked my brother and I what we wanted to do. My brother wanted to get into banking and financing, and I wasn't clear on what I wanted to do but I knew I didn't want to work as hard as my father, so he said stay away from hospitality. As you can tell, that did not work out. I did find my way into hospitality after all. I started my career in Munich and then worked in Berlin and London. I worked for some great properties in Europe, old school European hospitality where we would clean glasses with white gloves, we would iron newspapers to make sure that there was no ink that made it onto our guests' hands. When I was a doorman, I wore a big top hat. Very traditional European service. Then I found my way to the US and really fell in love with the United States. I worked in New York, opened a property in New York, spent a couple of years in DC, and then I found my way to Las Vegas. In 2015, I joined gaming. I've had an incredible career. It's been a wild ride. I worked for some great mentors and made many friends along the way. But when I came to Las Vegas in 2009, I was invited for dinner at Lakeside at the Wynn. That evening, I spent a little bit of time at Wynn and I saw all the entertainment options, the restaurants, the beautifully manicured horticulture, and so on. I thought to myself, one day I will want to work for Wynn. It took me 13 years, but 13 years later, I joined as head of hospitality at Wynn Las Vegas and served as EVP of operations. Then about a year ago, Craig Billings, our CEO, asked me to come visit Ras Al Khaimah. I came out here, fell in love with the project, fell in love with the culture, fell in love with the UAE, and I feel privileged to be part of this region with this signature project.

Yes, you can see it here behind us. It truly is stunning. It truly will be something very, very special. We're currently 45 stories out of the ground. We have 10,000 construction workers on site every day. The curtain wall is coming up. The rooms are being framed on the third floor and we're adding a story every week. So by December we will top off and we will have reached its full height of 300 meters, a little bit over 300 meters. And we will get ready for the opening. I was on site yesterday and we walk the site as an executive team every couple of weeks and we walk through the guest journey and we put ourselves in the shoes of the guest: what will the guest see, what will the guest hear, what will the guest smell, and what will the guest feel? It gives me goosebumps being in this building already and seeing the shape and character of this building shaping up. It truly is something very special. I've done a few things in my career, but this one is something very, very special. The beauty about this building here is that it is spearheaded by our design and development team out of Las Vegas. We're one of the very few hospitality companies that still has an in-house design and development team where they curate every part of the guest journey. When you stand in the lobby and you see the renderings, you can see it come to life. I get goosebumps thinking about the first guests checking into the space and really getting to experience Wynn Al Marjan Island. As you arrive on property, really exhaling as you enter the building and arrive at this beachside destination.

Yes, it's our first beachside resort and as you can see it's its own island. There are many, many firsts. It's also the tallest building that we've ever built. It has an attached marina. Just yesterday we released the first renderings for the room product. Something very unique about us is that we build a perfect replica of the room in Las Vegas to make sure that every detail is thought out and fully built out, and that we consider every part of the guest journey in the room. We have two perfect model rooms in Las Vegas that we had renderings of, which is a true reflection of what we're building. Every detail will have been thought of. The beauty here is that you will find the Wynn design vocabulary used in the design of the room, but you will also see a great sense of place where we bring this beautiful coastline of Ras Al Khaimah into the room and really complement the in-room experience.

We have great respect for all the operators here in the UAE. When you consider Dubai, Dubai does luxury and glamour probably better than any other city in the world. We have great respect for the operators here and many of the brands that are represented here at ATM are some of the best brands in the world and they all have locations here. We enjoy having a design and development team that builds these incredible assets, these incredible buildings for us. It takes somebody very, very special to build a building such as this, 300 meters tall, 20 plus restaurants, 1500 rooms, so on. It takes somebody very special with a lot of courage and vision, but also takes somebody very special to operate a building such as this. For us at Wynn, we have a strong sense of culture that is the bedrock of everything that we do. Our CEO, Craig Billings, will make this point every time he welcomes new hires. He speaks about the pyramid that makes up our organization. The foundation is the culture. Our culture is one that is very unique and one of high performance. Everything that we do is guided by four values. One value is service driven. For us, service isn't just a thing. It is the main thing and it drives everything that we do. Another value is artistry. We approach everything that we do as an artist would in the pursuit of perfection. We still arrive at excellence, which is another value of ours that we strive for every single day. We want to be recognized as one of the best operators in the world. The last value that we have is progressive. There are certain things that will never change about us and there are certain things that will evolve. Ultimately, it is the people that work with us that make these buildings tick. We realize that only people make people happy and our team is the key to success. We hope to build the same kind of culture here in Ras Al Khaimah.

Thank you. It's a true privilege working for an organization that is as invested in the guest experience as we are. Some of the best hotels in the world enjoy two and three five-star designations. If you're not familiar with Forbes Travel Guide, it is the Olympic gold medal. People travel from all over the world to stay at properties that have these five-star designations. In Las Vegas, we have five five-star designations. At Wynn Palace, we have six five-star designations. Each one of our sister properties enjoys five-star designations. As you know, with great privilege comes great responsibility. We intend to do the same here. The guest experience that we intend to curate here really starts with the culture that I just touched on, then is complemented by the state-of-the-art design and again our in-house design and development team led by Todd Avery Lenahan, the president of Wynn Design and Development, really sets the stage. That is very unique that you have a design and development team that touches every touch point along the guest journey from the guest room to the elevators to the public spaces to the restaurants to the entertainment, the beachfront, the poolscape, the theaters. Everything is touched by our design and development team. You arrive with a very cohesive, high-level guest experience from A to Z. Then you complement it with the sense of guest service and the sense of passion and the dedication that we enjoy seeing in our team members, and you reinforce it with a sense of storytelling and a sense of belonging and a sense of loyalty that we foster with our teams.

We've put together a team of what I call Navy SEALs, industry leaders that have done large scale projects, marquee projects in gateway cities for some of the most respected brands in the world. They have operated and opened projects such as these. It's really important that you have that opening experience. Number two, we wanted to attract leaders who have operated in this market. This is a very unique market. This consumer has a very high expectation. On the operations team, we found a couple of leaders on the executive committee that have operated some best-in-class facilities here in market. Lastly, we wanted to make sure that we attract our colleagues from Las Vegas and Boston and Macau to make sure that we protect this culture. We've built a team of Navy SEALs that will aid us in operating this, that have the local understanding of the market, that have operated and opened new resorts, and also some that understand who we are as a team. In fact, 50% of the senior executive team has come from other Wynn properties, which is testament to the culture that we're trying to breed.

I think if we can make good on the vision in 2030, the inbound tourism will have tripled into Ras Al Khaimah. The destination will have transformed. It will be an international must-see destination. I think it will compete with some of the best-in-class destinations in the region. I hope that I will stand alongside my team that I opened this property with and look towards the future and fulfilled the vision and made the company proud and built the kind of culture that we have built in Las Vegas and Macau and in Boston.

Pleasure. Thank you.