Posted on 06/08/2008 4:04:56 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Beware talk of Dubai being home to the world's biggest hotel. The recently expanded Venetian hotel in Las Vegas now offers 7,000 rooms - topping the 6,500 rooms at the planned Asia Asia in Dubailand.
The Venetian's new $2bn, 50-storey Palazzo extension adds two award-winning restaurant franchises and a nightclub run by Jay-Z. In total the hotel now offers 50 restaurants, cafés, bars and banqueting halls can serve 10,000 diners a night.
Asia Asia, due to open in 2010, plans for 6,500 rooms (of which 5,100 will be four-star and 1,400 five star), but, with plenty of desert space, could add more if the world record was needed. The Bawadi area of Dubailand is expected to add 29,200 rooms to the Dubai hotel inventory by 2016, and includes 31 hotels and more than 100 restaurants.
The Venetian's owners, the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, describe the hotel "a city within a city" and that the extension marks "the beginning of the meta-resort' era of Las Vegas". Besides the new restaurants and club, the hotel includes its own three-story Barneys department store and a theatre, currently showing the Tony award-winning Broadways hit, Jersey Boys, the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
The plan is to offer the largest block-booking service in the US, so called 'whale' bookings. Single party groups will be able to block book 6,000 rooms at a time, ideal for conferences and trade events.
(Excerpt) Read more at kippreport.com ...
Gee, I’ll bet one day soon they could build a casino so big, it could reach up to Heaven.
What’s that? Oh. Never mind...
Are you babeling?
They are currently building the tower of babel in Dubai right now.
The play on words of the day!
I’m staying at the Palazzo next month with my two best childhood girlfriends from New York! They’ve never been to Vegas, and I can’t wait to show them around, stay in this fabulous hotel, go shoppig and do spa stuff...None of us gamble (at least I don’t ANYMORE). That’s the great thing about Vegas, there’s always something fabulous to do and see.
I was at the Palazzo last month.
The place is really nice.
It blows my mind how fast they build these new hotels.
It’ll be interesting to see when there’s a glut.
The stock chart tells you there already is...(LVS)
With the cost of gasoline and air fares rising I think Las Vegas is going to be in for some hard times.
We’ve got over 135,000 hotel/motel rooms now and the average occupancy rate (what percentage of all rooms are full each night) is holding around 94% for hotel rooms and 89% for motels. Occupancy on the Strip itself is slightly higher.
For the non-hoteliers out there, that means that 94% of all the hotel rooms in Las Vegas are full every single night of the year. And on weekends, it never falls below 95% and 26 weekends of the year occupancy is over 98%. Sick, huh? Not much chance of a glut soon.
It’ll be easier to use Vegas as an internment site with all those hotels and rooms (if they ever have to).
I’m impressed, however, with the rising gas prices (reduced disposable income) and the building of massive hotels, isn’t a glut inevitable?
How much is higher gas going to hurt the average Vegas visitor? I bet not much at all.
I helped specify products on both tower 2 (Venezia) and tower 3 (Palazzo)
“With the cost of gasoline and air fares rising I think Las Vegas is going to be in for some hard times.”
Don’t worry, the taxpayers will come to the rescue:
300-mph train finds a $45 million booster
Bush OKs funds for Disneyland to Las Vegas rail ride
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/07/BUNJ114RS7.DTL
We stayed at the Palazzo for a week last month too. It was by far our nicest experience in LV yet. Other than doing the Hoover Dam thing one day, we never left the building.
Yes, it is amazing how fast things can change out there. Last time we stayed at the MGM Grand and across the Strip a bit to the north, there was an old, absolutely puny in comparison 50s/60s era hotel/casino (Boardwalk perhaps?) cordoned off for demolition. Tried to find the site last month and I believe there’s a CVS pharmacy there now. Pretty expensive turf for a drug store!
The owners want their ROI ASAP. If you put up $2 billion you don’t want to waste 2 or 3 years to start making it back. Government could learn from that.
On the flip side, if you search the news for how many construction workers have died this year in Las Vegas, I think you’ll find the number is 7 men in the first 5 months of 2008 who have been killed building resorts in Las Vegas this year.
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