Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Expo experts: Land won't be easy for casinos to find

An excess of nearby land has for years worked in favor of Las Vegas hotel-casino developers.

Want a new resort, complete with a lagoon and sinking pirate ships? Just redevelop part of your parking lot, as Steve Wynn did when Mirage Resorts built Treasure Island near The Mirage in the early 1990s.

Need a new hotel tower, casino and mall? Then knock down a nearby motel, as Sheldon Adelson's Las Vegas Sands Inc. did to the historic but long-past-its-prime Tam O'Shanter earlier this year.

Or bulldoze and blast away an entire property and replace it anew, as happened in the creation of numerous Strip icons such as Mandalay Bay (once the site of the Hacienda), Bellagio (the Dunes) and the Aladdin, which replaced its former namesake.

And so it's gone for years. But that trend won't last much longer, a casino development expert said Tuesday at the Global Gaming Expo.

"You haven't, up to this point, had to put yourself through the torture and kind of calisthenics that occur in many of the buildings that were built in closed or limited terms" in other cities, Vincent DeSimone, chairman of New York-based DeSimone Consulting Engineers, said of Las Vegas casino operators. "But the Strip is getting smaller and smaller and the free properties are becoming less and less."

A prime example of Las Vegas' likely future is found in its recent history, DeSimone added, citing Adelson's decision to grow The Venetian by building the 1,013-room Venezia hotel tower atop an existing parking garage. That project opened in June 2003.

"Renovation gives you the ability to get off the rubber very quickly and make the money you want to make," said DeSimone, whose past gaming clients include New Jersey's Trump Plaza and Caesars Atlantic City; Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, Conn.; and the Bahamas' Atlantis resort.

But making significant changes in a casino's 24-hour environment can be particularly challenging. Construction noise can inconvenience hotel guests, prompting room giveaways that slowly erode the bottom line. More significantly, bad construction planning can chase away customers altogether, said Dick Meister, vice president of construction and design for Biloxi, Miss.-based Isle of Capri Casinos.

"The worst thing you can do is have someone drive up and not know how to get into your facility," Meister said. "When that happens, they're going to visit your competition and it will cost you a whole lot of time and money to get them back."

Panelist Denis Finigan, president of New Orleans-based architecture firm Urban Systems, told the audience the keys to a successful renovation project include ensuring that guests, suppliers and workers have adequate access and parking; that signs clearly direct patrons around work sites; and good coordination between project designers and the workers who will make use of the planned improvements.