CAESARS FORUM: ON THE HORIZON FOR LAS VEGAS MEETINGS This month, Caesars Entertainment Corporation made the kind of announcement that captures the attention of any planner interested in bringing large meetings and events to Las Vegas. By the second quarter of 2018, the company will break ground on CAESARS FORUM, a 550,000-sq.-ft. conference center located east of the Las Vegas Strip. The venue will be connected via bridges to Harrah’s and The LINQ Hotel, and via an outdoor plaza to The LINQ Promenade. The most salient feature of the $375 million facility will be its two 108,000-sq.-ft. ballrooms, the largest pillarless ballrooms in North America. Rounding out the overall 316,000 sq. ft. of total function space will be two 40,000-sq.-ft. ballrooms and stateof-the-art boardrooms, complemented by a 100,000-sq.-ft. outdoor plaza suitable for expansive F&B functions. Scheduled to officially open in 2020, CAESARS FORUM will feature the latest in technology and design. “This was a real blank slate for us; we had almost unlimited resources to work with,” says Michael Massari, Chief Sales Officer. Massari discusses the genesis of the new venue and what will make it one of the world’s most “customer friendly” conference facilities. What was the motivation for creating CAESARS FORUM? The Flamingo, and particularly the Harrah’s and LINQ hotels, have a disproportionately low amount of meeting space, so we wanted to fix that problem in order to get more meeting attendees at those hotels. Can you describe the kind of group business you expect the facility to draw? When you’re attaching a 300,000-sq.-ft. facility and the two largest ballrooms ever built to 8,500 hotel rooms, you’re doing everything — big national sales meetings, product launches, tradeshows, association events … Over the course of the year we’ll probably do 4,000 meetings and events at this facility. We’re building it for events that are in the 1,000- to 6,000-person range; I think that’s really the sweet spot. What do you consider CAESARS FORUM’s most significant design feature? This is the fifth big meeting facility [construction project] that I’ve been a part of, and the real trick to these is to build them with the amount of flexibility that you need in order to do anything that the customer wants. So I think it’s a catchphrase that we’re building the two largest ballrooms ever built, but we’re also building the two most divisible ballrooms ever built. And I think that’s probably going to end up being more valuable to us. The airwall configuration is really state of the art, and I think it’s the key contributor to the success of the building for us and our customers. We’ll have more linear feet of airwall than has ever been put into a building. That allows us to do all these unique things, such
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as having a general session and then 20 breakouts, lunch and then 20 more breakouts, all using the same exact space. How divisible will the ballrooms be? That remains to be seen, as we’re still finishing up the last pieces of the interior design. But [taking into account] all four ballrooms that are in this space, it looks like it will be something in the range of 200 individual spaces and something like 400 or 500 meeting room combinations. When you have that kind of size, divisibility and flexibility, [a group is] going to be all on one floor. So you have contiguous space from an attendee standpoint, as well as really easy load in and load out. Does the venue have any special relation to the Forum Tower at Caesars Palace? The Forum Tower and the CAESARS FORUM were both named after the same place, which is the original Forum in ancient Rome. It was a place of commerce and a place to exchange ideas and debate. It was also one of the most advanced architectural places of its time. So we thought that made sense in terms of the name. CAESARS FORUM will have about the same total meeting space as Caesars Palace. If a planner is deciding between the venues for a large event, what are some factors to consider? There is a difference in the type of feel that Caesars Palace has versus The LINQ and Harrah’s, so I think there’s a place for different customers to make different choices there. But I think the much more practical reason will be that the largest space at Caesars Palace is 50,000 sq. ft. while the largest at CAESARS FORUM will be 108,000 sq. ft. So if you outgrow the space at Caesars Palace you can move to CAESARS FORUM. What will be the venue’s niche in the national meetings marketplace? There are roughly 30 hotels across the country that compete for the large meetings market, and so this facility will jump right in there and become the 31st really. It’s a great place to compete, and we think we’ve got the expertise and now the additional product to help us compete. We’ve got a few irons in the fire already, and without naming names, we have a half-dozen major corporations that saw the press announcement and called their salesperson and said, “We should take a look at that for our annual conference in 2020.” Will the construction create any disruptions that clients should be aware of? It’s basically a green-field build, so there will be no impact whatsoever on customers. The facility will connect into Harrah’s and The LINQ pretty seamlessly. It’s a really nice situation in that regard. —G.S.
Facilities & destinations 2017 Fall / Winter