A spruced-up spa and
a new golf course are
among the enhancements
at Biloxi’s Beau Rivage
Resort & Casino.
America’s love affair with gaming continues apace. While Las Vegas still leads the charge, destinations such as Atlantic City and the Mississippi Gulf Coast are catching up, especially when it comes to auxiliary features such as world-class hotels, name-brand restaurants, top-tier entertainment and state-of-the-art convention facilities. Of course, the biggest boom is in Native American properties, a realm worthy of a discussion all its own (see this accompanying article).
One undeniable trend of recent months has been the supersizing of gaming properties and the companies that create them. For proof, look no further than the section on Nevada beginning on page 60, where news that the gargantuan Wynn Las Vegas, itself only a few months old, already has announced an impending $1.4 billion expansion somehow seems perfectly natural. And the boom hardly is confined to the Strip.
For more of the latest gaming news from around the nation, read on.
Illinois
In the works is a $62 million hotel tower attached to the Harrah’s Metropolis Casino riverboat, in Metropolis on the Ohio River, across from Kentucky. The 258-room property will have a 12,000-square-foot events center for up to 1,200 people. Groundbreaking took place last month for a spring 2006 opening.
The Casino Queen & Hotel in East St. Louis will begin a $150 million expansion later this summer.
Louisiana
Harrah’s New Orleans Casino is building a $142 million, 450-room hotel tower, to open early next year.
L’Auberge du Lac Hotel & Casino opened in May in Lake Charles, near the Texas border. The 770,000-square-foot newcomer features a casino, a golf course, five restaurants and a pool complex. The 26-story hotel has 743 guest rooms, while the 26,000 square feet of meeting space includes a 14,175-square-foot ballroom. Outside are the poolside Island area and the Parc Fleur de Lys lawn, both ideal for events.
Coming soon:
Detroit’s Greektown Casino
is adding a 400-room hotel.
Michigan
The Greektown Casino, MGM Grand Detroit Casino and MotorCity Casino, all in Detroit, are facing legal challenges that have halted of construction of three 400-room hotels, one at each property.
The Mandalay Resort Group sold its 53.5 percent interest in MotorCity immediately prior to its April 25 merger with fellow casino giant MGM Mirage.
Mississippi
September will mark the opening of the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Biloxi. The $235 million property will have 317 guest rooms, as well as a gaming barge, a spa, four restaurants and a concert hall.
At press time, the $80 million expansion of the Isle of Capri Casino Resort in Biloxi was on the verge of opening. Featuring 400 guest rooms for a new property total of 767, the expansion also offers 34,000 square feet of meeting space, including a 12,000-square-foot events center, for a new grand total of 49,000 square feet.
In February 2006, the 1,740-room Beau Rivage Resort & Casino in Biloxi will open a new 18-hole Tom Fazio-designed golf course called Fallen Oak. The course will not be on the grounds of the property itself, but rather adjacent to the city’s DeSoto National Forest. Meanwhile, the resort recently renovated its lobby and expanded its spa.
Harrison County, which includes the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, recently hiked its hotel room tax from 3 to 5 percent. The area convention and visitors bureau will receive 2.25 percent of the tax, while the remainder will go to Biloxi’s Mississippi Gulf Coast Coliseum & Convention Center. In addition, a $68 million expansion of the center will open in 2007 and include 200,000 square feet of exhibit space, bringing the facility’s total to 380,000 square feet.
Missouri
Pinnacle Entertainment plans to build a $250 million hotel-casino in St. Louis in early 2007. No timeline has been released, but a 100-room hotel, a cinema and a bowling alley have been mentioned.
Nevada
Las Vegas
This fabled former desert outpost celebrated its 100th birthday on May 15, a date that also marked the first anniversary of the tenure of Rossi Ralenkotter, CEO of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority.
April saw the long-awaited opening of Wynn Las Vegas, with 2,726 guest rooms, 217 acres of grounds, 200,000 square feet of meeting space and an 18-hole golf course (the only one right on the Las Vegas Strip). Function space includes two ballrooms, measuring 50,000 and 25,000 square feet, respectively, and 20 meeting rooms; also on site are a spa and 18 restaurants. The property built a 2,080-seat theater expressly to house Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian company whose extraordinary acrobatic productions leave audiences gaping in astonishment.
Such is the buzz behind the property that owner Steve Wynn already has announced construction of an expansion, to open in the first half of 2008. To be called Encore, the 20-acre addition will have a 1,500-suite hotel tower, a concert area, 40,000 square feet of casino space and a price tag of $1.4 billion.
Bellagio opened its 928-room Spa Tower last December; the addition boosted the property’s room count to 3,930. Inside the tower are 60,000 square feet of meeting space.
The 4,049-room Venetian Resort-Hotel-Casino soon will become the largest hotel on the planet with a staggering total of 7,074 rooms thanks to its Palazzo Casino Resort tower addition. At 53 stories, the tower will offer a hefty 3,025 rooms of its own upon opening in mid-2007. The Palazzo also will feature a casino and 450,000 square feet of meeting space. The price: $1.6 billion. Need a large room block? No problem. Venetian officials say they’ll be able to book groups of up to 6,000.
New in the mega-merger department: Last year, two of the biggest gaming entities in town, MGM Mirage and Mandalay Resort Group, decided to tie the knot. The confetti had hardly settled before the new company, imaginatively named MGM Mirage/Mandalay Resort Group, announced its first joint project, the multibillion-dollar CityCenter. Plans call for an sprawling 550,000 square feet of dining, shopping and entertainment, plus a 1,650-unit condominium complex and three 400-room boutique-style hotels, all on 66 acres between the Bellagio and Monte Carlo hotel-casinos. Work will begin in late 2006 or early 2007, with an opening projected for 2010.
Harrah’s Entertainment, which in 2004 merged with Caesars Entertainment in a $7.9 billion deal, completed in May a 60,000-square-foot expansion of the conference center at its Rio All Suite Hotel & Casino. The $39 million project increased the 2,563-suite property’s total meeting space to 160,000 square feet, which now includes a grand total of 80 meeting rooms.
Meanwhile, the Caesars Entertainment half of the marriage will open a new $289 million, 26-story hotel tower at Caesars Palace later this summer. The tower, which will include 86,000 square feet of meeting space and a ballroom, will raise the total room count at the property from 2,418 to 3,367. In addition, Caesars plans to pump $76 million into upgrading its function space in the property’s existing tower.
Among the news about Las Vegas’ smaller properties: A $1 billion, 1.5 million-square-foot addition to the 670-room Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel & Casino is in the works. On a 24-acre plot next to the resort’s original tower, the project will feature approximately 1,500 guest rooms and is set for completion in May 2007.
Hard Rock is not the only restaurant chain sizzling in Vegas. Houston-based Landry’s Restaurants Inc., which owns the Rainforest Cafe, among other chains, bought the 1,907-room Golden Nugget in February, while Hooters will open the Hooters Casino Hotel this fall on the site of the 711-room Hotel San Remo, which remains open.
The Moulin Rouge Hotel & Casino currently is undergoing a $200 million revamp following a fire two years ago. The 950,000-square-foot property will reopen in December featuring a new tower with 150 rooms, a casino, a 1,000-seat showroom and a 9,000-seat event center. The existing tower will be reconfigured to offer 58 suites (from its former 100 guest rooms).
The Wild Wild West Hall & Casino is expanding from 262 guest rooms to 1,000. Work will begin in the first half of 2006, with completion expected in 2008. The property will remain open throughout the construction process.
Station Casinos, owners of the above-mentioned Wild Wild West venue, will open its new flagship Red Rock Station Resort in early 2006, in the Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin. The $475 million property will feature an 850-room hotel, an 87,000-square-foot casino, 10 restaurants, a nightclub, a 16-screen cinema, a 35,000-square-foot spa, a pool with cabanas and an artificial beach, and approximately 94,000 square feet of meeting space.
Finally, Miami’s famed Fontainebleau Resort is opening a sister property here, under the management of Turnberry Associates, which recently bought the Florida property. The as-yet-unnamed resort will have approximately 4,000 rooms, a casino, a price tag of $1.5 billion and a probable opening date of 2008. The chosen site used to be the home of two famous Vegas properties: the Algiers and El Rancho casino-resorts; the sale kills off a proposed London-theme casino resort.
Reno
The ultraglitzy, 1,000-room Atlantis Casino Resort Spa remodeled its Atrium hotel tower, which contains 278 guest rooms, as well as added a new cobblestoned entrance.
The 2,003-room Hilton Reno will change its name to the Grand Sierra later this year, a company of the same name having bought it in May. The new owners plan a second hotel tower and a water park, but no timeline has been announced so far.
New Jersey
The oceanside gaming mecca of Atlantic City is rising to the very considerable challenges of competing with Las Vegas, as witness the phenomenal success of the 2,010-room Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, which opened less than two years ago and gives the megaresorts of the Strip a decided run for their money.
Last November, the Tropicana Casino & Resort celebrated the opening of its 502-room hotel tower, raising the resort’s total guest room count to 2,126. This $265 million expansion resulted in an additional 120,000 square feet of meeting space along with a 200,000-square-foot entertainment area called The Quarter.
For its part Resorts Atlantic City last July opened a new 27-story, 459-room hotel tower, called the Rendezvous, giving the resort a total of 962 guest rooms. The property also added some casino space and an impressive new entrance linking its two towers.
With its glorious natural beach (perhaps the only attraction here that Las Vegas cannot lay claim to), Atlantic City also aims to rival Miami with its 2,200-seat House of Blues Beach Bar & Lounge, opening on July 4 at the 1,309-room Showboat, the Mardi Gras Casino, and, already open at Resorts, a new beach nightclub called Nikki Beach, a 50,000-square-foot venue whose design is based on namesake counterparts in places such as Miami Beach and St. Tropez, France.
The Trump Taj Mahal will begin work on a 1,300-room tower (for a total of approximately 2,500 rooms) and 70,000 square feet of new meeting space (for a total of 215,000 square feet), while its sister properties, the 904-room Trump Plaza and 728-room Trump Marina casino-hotels soon will begin complete makeovers.