The Las Vegas you know and love (or hate) is in the midst of a reinvention.
More than $5 billion worth of construction investment has poured into “Sin City” recently—resulting in such flashy ribbon-cuttings as the $375 million T-Mobile arena (home venue to the Vegas Golden Knights, a team that just advanced to the conference finals in its first season) and plans for an NFL team (born the Oakland Raiders) to play in a glitzy, new $2 billion stadium.
That’s just sports. The convention center, which gets flooded with international visitors for conferences, from the Consumer Electronic Show to the Roller Skating Industry Convention, is being overhauled and expanded at a cost of $1.4 billion, and hotel mainstays, from the Palms to Caesars, are getting nine-figure renovations.
It’s a boom unlike any the city has seen in almost 30 years.
“The 1990s were when we came out with the marketing campaign, ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,’” explains Rossi Ralenkotter, chief executive officer of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “International trade shows were starting to come into town. Las Vegas was just becoming an exciting place.”
It was the only real boom since the city came of age in the late 1970s. “That was when Steve Wynn built the Mirage and all those resorts came in. The legalization of the gaming scene in Atlantic City made us wonder what we needed to do to compete,” Ralenkotter tells Bloomberg.
Fast forward to 2018, and the city is due for another marketing makeover. Following the mass shooting that took place in October, the city has experienced a tourism slump of 4.2 percent.
Luckily for all that bet big on Sin City, the current growth should do more than keep Vegas relevant. Look no farther than the $550 million revamp of the Monte Carlo, which officially becomes the Park MGM this week. The new hotel—the result of a four-year collaboration between MGM CEO Jim Murren and hotel luminary Andrew Zobler (whose hotels include Manhattan’s NoMad and L.A.’s the Line)—is poised to be Vegas’s new entertainment and dining hub.
Among its draws are 2,604 glamorous rooms, three intimate pools inspired by the French Riviera, the sixth American outpost of Eataly, and more than a dozen restaurants by a who’s who of influential chefs. Even such big names as Daniel Humm and Will Guidara—of Eleven Madison Park—and L.A. entrepreneur Roy Choi are getting in on the fun.
A New Flagship
“We’d invested billions in the neighborhood surrounding the Monte Carlo,” Murren told Bloomberg. “And yet it had become a dormitory for people coming to town; it had terrible brand-awareness.”