SELLING THE GREAT OUTDOORS

The owner of a rough-and-tumble downtown Las Vegas casino is expanding his reach to the bucolic, alpine environment of Mount Charleston, and he's betting his customers will follow.

Stephen Siegel, whose portfolio includes the Gold Spike casino downtown and several Siegel Suites apartment buildings, recently added the Mount Charleston Hotel to his growing empire.

The property, which he renamed the Resort on Mount Charleston, is on Kyle Canyon Road and is the first hospitality business visitors encounter on their way up the mountain.

Siegel took over the mortgage from Great American Capital of Las Vegas, which acquired the hotel and nearly six acres of property in 2004 for $4 million, according to Clark County property records.

Under the new arrangement, Siegel gains full control of the operation and ownership of the site while Great American remains as a silent partner.

During a recent tour Siegel, 37, detailed his plans to capitalize on the scenic site of the hotel and improve on the bar, dining, spa, fitness and sleeping accommodations.

Workers are already building a small gym that faces east with the canyon in the foreground and the Las Vegas Valley in the distance.

And Siegel is working to tie the mountain resort into a rewards program that will include the Gold Spike, the apartment complexes he owns and the Barcelona hotel-casino in Las Vegas, another recently acquired property.

Siegel will also go to work on the signs and other visual elements facing Kyle Canyon Road, where about 3,200 cars pass daily.

"Now we're coming here and we're going to start getting real aggressive," he said.

The hotel was built in the 1980s and has 64 guest rooms, including several multiroom suites.

One spacious suite Siegel showed included a kitchenette with new granite counters, stainless steel minirefrigerator, wine refrigerator, oven and range, large bathroom, balcony and two flat-screen televisions.

Other guest rooms are smaller but have balconies overlooking either the canyon from the back of the hotel or the road and a large pond from the front.

The lobby area is huge, with high ceilings and a lodgelike atmosphere, with a restaurant and banquet hall off one side and a bar with floor-to-ceiling windows off the other.

There's also a small retail space for selling snacks and trinkets.

Siegel said the location, scenic surroundings, amenities at the hotel and relative dearth of competition on the mountain attracted him to the deal.

"I had no idea what Mount Charleston was," said Siegel of his first visit. "This is a definite diamond in the rough."

Although the property itself has myriad potential revenue sources from alcohol sales to video poker machines to a full-service spa, the most lucrative aspect of Siegel's plan may also be the most innovative.

"The room is not where you are making most of your money," Siegel said. "It is almost as if it is a gimme to get them to buy room service," and other amenities.

In addition to some traditional advertising, Siegel wants to link the Resort on Mount Charleston into listings on Las Vegas hotel-booking sites in search of customers who want to visit Las Vegas but stay in a more serene setting.

If he successfully establishes a rewards program to include his apartments, casinos and the mountain hotel, it would be one of the most inventive marketing efforts in town.

While Station Casinos, MGM Mirage and Harrah's have managed to link numerous local casinos to each other and even to out-of-state properties, no one in Las Vegas has a similar Mount Charleston connection nor a points program to reach people in their homes when they pay rent.

"That's brilliant," said Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor deal guide. "This just makes a ton of sense."

In addition to tying Siegel Suites and Gold Spike to Mount Charleston, Siegel will include hotel units at Barcelona. He also wants to link Barcelona, which will be called Siegel Slots and Suites, to an on-site grocery store and gasoline station.

"The incentive is to bring them to his other money-generating ventures. In terms of innovation, he gets the gold star this year," Curtis said. "There are a whole lot of aspects to this that are very clever."

Curtis said Siegel, who dropped out of high school to embark on a business career in Los Angeles before heading to Nevada, is an example of the type of bold dealmakers likely to capitalize on the rubble of the recession by bringing new ideas into Las Vegas.

Although Siegel is operating on a relatively small scale so far, there will be new opportunities for other entrepreneurs as the major gaming companies are pressured to sell prime casino properties to assuage jittery investors and pay down cumbersome debt.

"Steve Wynn called it unbundling, and I see more of it happening," Curtis said. "What made Vegas a value was the number of casinos and the competition factor. When they began to consolidate, a lot of that got taken away."

Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3861.