Feature: Resorts World Las Vegas
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enting Group is famous worldwide for its casino product but is only now striking into the heart of gambling, Las Vegas. On June 24 it debuted Resorts World Las Vegas, a $4.3 billion metaresort combining three hotels (all Hilton-branded) with a 5,000-seat showroom, a bevy of nightlife and, of course, a casino. The main hotel, the Las Vegas Hilton, brings the brand back to Vegas after it was ignominiously stripped from what is now (under new ownership) Westgate Las Vegas, one of Resorts World’s many signal achievements, which also will eventually include an Elon Musk subway linkup, whereby visitors are shuttled in modified Tesla vehicles to the nearby Las Vegas Convention Center. Resorts World Las Vegas has been long in gestation and some of its more fanciful attractions, such as a panda habitat, long ago fell by the wayside. So too did a water park and recreation of the Great Wall of China. What remains is sleek leisure product that bowed to keen anticipation. Instead of being hobbled by the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on Las Vegas, Resorts World is riding a faster-than-anticipated wave of recovery, giving tourists something to look forward to as they return to the Las Vegas Strip. If Resorts World succeeds, as all indications are that it will, it will be a much-needed jolt of electricity for the north Strip, where properties like the Sahara and Circus Circus have been hanging in there, waiting for players to have a reason to come north again. (The business plan of short-lived SLS Las Vegas was premised overwhelmingly on sponging off traffic generated by Resorts World.) It’s also well-positioned to capitalize on the new extension of the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is stretching to encompass the old Riviera site, just across the street, and its trio of hotels will make a convenient ‘dormitory’ for the conventioneers who – Vegas has discovered – are its bread-and-butter customer. It was a long and circuitous road that brought Genting to Las Vegas and Resorts World to fruition. It began in 2007 when Boyd Gaming imploded the legendary Stardust, with an eye to replacing it with a megaresort development called Echelon Place. Boyd had sunk 90 percent of the foundation and had started erecting the structural steel when, in 2008, the Great Recession struck. Echelon Place was placed on ice, its future uncertain. By 2012, Boyd gave up and sold the 88 acre-site (valued at $15 million per acre) to Genting at $4 million Volume 17: Issue 145
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