When the modern world isn't suffering through a global pandemic, there's big money to be made in the hotel industry.
Due to the exponential growth of global travel before COVID-19, more and more hotels have been popping up all over the planet - and they've been getting bigger and bigger.
But where are the biggest of them all?
Five of the ten largest hotels in the world are located in Las Vegas. That's not surprising given there's more than 150,000 hotel rooms in the Vegas metropolitan area, which is roughly a third of the size of Auckland.
Barkhatnie Sezony in Sochi was the world's largest hotel in the world when it was completed in 2014 for the Winter Olympic Games, when it boasted 8500 rooms. But it's since been downsized and now has a comparatively modest capacity of 4688 rooms, dropping it down to ninth largest hotel in the world.
To put that into perspective, the revamped Cordis is New Zealand's largest hotel with 650 rooms.
The world's 10 largest hotels by room capacity in 2021:
First World Hotel, Malaysia - 7351 rooms
The Venetian Resort Las Vegas - 7092 rooms
MGM Grand Las Vegas - 6852 rooms
CityCenter, Las Vegas - 6790 rooms
Sands Cotai Central (Recently rebranded as The Londoner) - 6246 rooms
Abraj Al Bait, Saudi Arabia - 5383 rooms
Izmailovo Hotel, Moscow - 5000 rooms
Wynn Las Vegas - 4750 rooms
Barkhatnie Sezony, Sochi - 4688 rooms
Mandalay Bay Las Vegas - 4426 rooms
The top 50 largest hotels includes establishments from just 13 countries: the US (mostly in Las Vegas), Malaysia, Macau, Saudia Arabia, Russia, Thailand, Japan, the Bahamas, Mexico, Turkey, Singapore and Japan.
