What’s To Come For the Las Vegas Strip by 2020

Lined with some of the most upscale and luxurious hotels and casinos in the world, the Las Vegas Strip is the ideal picturesque image of the sin city that we all envision in our minds. Within its scenic concentration of resort and casino real estate also lie world-class residential high-rise buildings, restaurants, unique entertainment complexes, a skyline that is to die for, and the most highly-rated live music performance venues and nightclubs that exist. Nevada is also home to some of the world’s biggest music festivals, including Insomniac Events’ EDC Las Vegas (Electric Daisy Carnival), Life Is Beautiful, and Burning Man, not to mention The Killers live from the front of Caesars Palace in the center of The Strip as part of a Jimmy Kimmel Live concert series, earlier this year.

Things are only getting better from here for the famous scenic strip. Over the past couple of years, the Las Vegas Strip has gained the most traveler attention to its date, and is now one of the most iconic tourist destinations in the nation. With an increase in tourism comes the need to supply the strip with more of these modern and upscale hotels, resorts, and casinos, so that visitors can embark on the once-in-a-lifetime experience only the city of Las Vegas can provide for them.

Luckily, brand new deluxe hotel, resort, and casino openings have been announced, as well as both completed and ongoing renovation plans for a few existing properties as well. The strategic business and architectural planning that is put into the building and reconstructing these extravagant buildings requires an exquisite amount of time (and billions of dollars), but we hope to witness all these new upcoming changes by the year 2020. From here on forward, visiting and residing at the Las Vegas strip will be more preeminent than ever before.

In fact, some of the most recognized properties have already revitalized under months of reconstruction. The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino revamped its Casino Tower’s 575 guest rooms this past year. The company wanted to accentuate guest rooms with a design that would incorporate the true atmosphere of the casino and high-roller lifestyle, which is the property’s main attraction. All with views of the sparkling Las Vegas skyline, the new suites now demonstrate walls full of light gray, white, and plum tones and a contemporary design style. These renovations have attracted some of the hottest live music performers to the property, with several surprise acts to be announced in the near future.

Planet Hollywood also recently completed its renovation project this past summer during the month of June. All 2,496 rooms were redesigned to represent the successes of Caesars Entertainment Corp and its existing luxury properties.  The newly designed rooms consist of brighter and more vibrant interiors full of color and mosaic portraits along their walls, as well as a true to life photograph of the night-time city skyline to bring about the vibrancy of Las Vegas nightlife within all guest rooms. Exceeding $100 million dollars, these Planet Hollywood renovations are the first of Caesars’ Las Vegas properties to officially be completed.

Another prominent Caesar property, The Flamingo, is currently undergoing renovations as well. The Flamingo’s 1,270 new rooms will speak for the hotel’s name themselves, featuring flamingo pink colors, gold accents, and contemporary-retro designs all throughout. Being that the property just celebrated its 70th anniversary last year, the company decided that it was time to spice things up and enliven the property without straying away from incorporating its history into its new design structure. Official renovation completion is in 2018, but luckily construction is going quickly and smoothly, meaning guests might even be able to experience the dashingly restored Flamingo property by the end of this year.

The acclaimed MGM Grand, one of the largest hotels in the world, is currently undergoing a $130 million dollar renovation on the strip in order to exceed competing properties in available overall space and guest capacity. The ongoing renovations will expand its already grand conference room and meeting space, introduce a new courtyard for private events, and spawn eleven breakout rooms. All of these alterations will supplement the property’s existing Marquee Ballroom and Grand Garden Arena, and will guarantee an increase in event related business demands for the company.

By the end of 2018 after undergoing a two-year, $450 million makeover, the noted Monte Carlo Hotel will transform into the new Park MGM, which will be MGM Resorts International’s newest luxury brand. In an interview, MGM’s CEO Jim Murren expressed his interest in the investing and remodeling of the Monte Carlo, as it has been actively operating since 1996. According to him, the hotel will remain open during reconstruction as the Monte Carlo until further notice. Murren is thrilled to reinvent the property’s original concept entirely to bring more life to the Vegas scene, and stated that “this a top-to-bottom, stem-to-stern type of re imagining with incredible talent that is not here, and that’s really why Las Vegas is doing so well because people continue to search for these one-of-a-kind moments and what they’ve never seen before.”  The new Park MGM is about to present a new wave of coexisting lavish hotel brands to the strip, as it is teaming up with the NoMad hotel brand and its also luxurious style such as those of its properties in  New York City and Los Angeles.

Wynn Resort and Casino is also revamping and will bring about a notion that the strip has never seen before. The property will be featuring its new Paradise Park concept, consisting of a 20-acre lagoon, a white sand waterfront and boardwalk, additional convention space, a new tower for about 1,000 new rooms, and fresh entertainment attractions. These striking add-on features will all reside alongside the resort on a 130-acre golf course owned by the company. It will be the first aquatic themed resort within the Las Vegas Strip borough. CEO Steve Wynn stated the importance of bringing about new concepts to his pre-existing operations, as he quotes, “If you’re not growing, you’re going backwards.” Construction for their new project is set to launch early this December and property owners expect the finishing touches to be completed by 2019.

Predominantly all prominent Las Vegas hotel properties such as the ones mentioned above are all clustered in the strip’s most popular southern segment. To create a new wave of real estate property trends, a few relatively new and currently in-the-works properties are opening up in the northern part of the strip, which will heat up a neoteric area away from its original hot spot.

What was supposed to be the luxurious SLS Las Vegas hotel, a leading brand also existent in South Beach and LA, unfortunately did not gain as much popularity on this segment of the strip as investors had hoped for. Fortunately, W Hotels (now under the Marriott International umbrella) took on a decision to expose the W Hotel brand to the sin city as an expansion of the existing SLS Las Vegas, which opened up earlier this year. The concept of this new refined W property is that of “a hotel within a hotel”, with opulent aspects of the SLS still in tact (dining and nightlife included) mixed with those of W Hotels, all creating a spectacular revamped property for high-class guests.

With W Hotels being a highly-recognized signature brand worldwide, the brand’s complementary hotel amenities exist at this new Las Vegas property as well. The hotel’s new service components include upscale social and nightlife venues such as the WET rooftop pool and The Living Room Lounge, the largest meeting space any other W hotel property holds, a 24 hour FIT gym, and its pampering Away spa. W Hotels couldn’t have made a better decision than with W Hotel Las Vegas, as this is the type of pretentious hotel brand the city was missing.

Shortly after the grand opening of the W Hotel, the opening of Las Vegas’s newest and most original property to date followed. The Lucky Dragon Hotel and Casino, an independently owned boutique property with 203 rooms, debuted its brand new and unique property concept in the northern cluster of the strip. The hotel was built to reflect authentic and traditional Asian culture and its prominent relationship with gaming, a huge aspect of what Las Vegas is all about. Property owners discussed that although the hotel’s main target market includes gaming fanatics such as Asian Americans and wealthy travelers from overseas, all are welcome to dwell into everything The Lucky Dragon has to offer. Its owners decided to make all aspects of the property as authentic as possible, from its ethnic dining options down to the language hotel employees use to greet and communicate with guests.

Throughout the hotel, guests will find common Asian table games such as Pai Gow poker, Baccarat, traditional slots, and a high-roller VIP gaming luxury area. Not to mention an indoor-outdoor Tea Garden “Cha Garden” featuring an exquisite tea sommelier, and a spa which promotes traditional Asian regional treatments such as acupuncture and reflexology among many others. The success of the hotel’s dining and entertainment venues have been so immense that the property disclosed its “Jazz Saturday” events at Cha Garden with happy-hour priced food and beverage options and live music, as well as its “Hot Manila Nights” which will take place every Friday at Dragon’s Alley, a venue placed strategically next to the main casino floor.

The Lucky Dragon features a lodging and entertainment image that Vegas has never witnessed since its upbringing, and a larger competing property nearby has fabricated a similar concept, except it is not set to open until 2020. Resort World, a $7 billion project owned by Genting Group (a powerful Malaysian based company) is under way to become Las Vegas’s newest grand property, with 3,500 rooms on an 86-acre lot. Similar to the Lucky Dragon, Resorts World’s main thematic attraction reflects Asian cultures and lifestyles but in a larger and brighter light. Originally, property owners hoped to incorporate old Chinese architecture and design concepts throughout the resort, but in the end decided to shift towards design elements that would attract millennials and represent a more modern Asian culture, such as the types you would find in Shanghai, China.

The resort’s amenities are rumored to be “the future” of hotels, resort, and casino properties and what better city to debut futuristic and celestial lodging features than Vegas? As of now, final specifics regarding these hotel amenities have not been released, but there has been talk about the property’s main areas featuring live panda bears, an enlarged 56 story high traditional Chinese lantern , an old-style Chinese garden view from certain guest rooms, artificial outdoor water landmarks, a 150,00 square foot casino, and even an astral sphere that will take selfies of guests once they are checked into the property. This coexisting mix of traditional and innovative Chinese-Asian flare designs will bring a new light to what Vegas resorts and casinos are all about, and will change the Vegas hotel operations game in the near future once the property hosts its grand opening in 2020.

Vegas will always be Vegas, but with all these ongoing development reconstructions and upbringings, who knows if the typical lodging scene in the sin city will change once and for all. For many, anytime Las Vegas is mentioned, hotels and resorts such a the Bellagio, Caesars Palace, and the Venetian are the first few that naturally come to mind. However, these state-of-the-art properties such as the ones described above are possibly a catalyst to property trends and design modules that the city is to demand highly down the line. Las Vegas already attracts a certain crowd, a crowd that loves to party, gamble, indulge in prestigious lodging and dining, explore exclusive entertainment venues and events, and witness the unimaginable. What’s to come for the Las Vegas Strip in the next couple of years will be revolutionary for the sin city in terms of lodging and entertainment, and will offset a new wave of modernized destination trends never seen before.

Photo: aLIVE Coverage