Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

World’s costliest hotel opens on the Las Vegas strip

Bellagio, the world's most expensive hotel, opened with fanfare and fireworks Thursday night, kicking off the start of a megaresort marathon on the Las Vegas Strip.

Tourism officials hope the opening of the $1.6 billion hotel-casino will jump-start this gaming capital's stagnant visitor volume, just as the parent Mirage Resorts Inc. did with the opening of their flagship Mirage hotel-casino in 1989, and Treasure Island in 1993.

The evening began with a party for more than 1,500 invited guests who paid $1,000 each to benefit The Foundation Fighting Blindness. Mirage Chairman Steve Wynn has the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa.

Thousands of onlookers jammed the strip to watch the activities as the VIPs partied inside then came out later for a fireworks show that culminated the evening.

The 36-story, 3,025-room resort replicates a Tuscan village and sits on an 11-acre, 22-million-gallon lake featuring 1,000 fountains that produce spectacular water displays.

"Everything's going great," Alan Feldman, vice president of public affairs, said earlier Thursday. "The employees are pumped. Everyone's got opening day butterflies, but that's healthy."

Jason Ader, senior managing director of Bear, Stearns & Co., and a leading gaming analyst, has said the opening of Bellagio "could be the most anticipated event in gaming history."

Gaming analysts and casino operators are watching to see the impact of Bellagio and other new resorts on the city's dormant visitor count and the dearth of coveted high-rollers due to Asian economic problems.

The visitor count is up only 1.2 percent so far this year. It increased 15.6 percent following the opening of the Mirage in 1989, and 19.9 percent in 1994, following the opening of Treasure Island, Luxor and MGM Grand resorts.

Bellagio's opening marks the start of a megaboom that will add as many as 20,000 new rooms here over the next two years at a price tag of nearly $7 billion.

They include:

- Mandalay Bay, 3,700-rooms, $950 million, scheduled to open March, 1999;

- The Venetian, 3,036-rooms, $1.2 billion, scheduled to open April 1999; A second 3,036-room phase is scheduled to follow. Total cost of the entire project, including the second tower and expansion of the Sands Expo Center, expected to run $2.5 billion;

- Paris, 2,900 rooms, $760 million, scheduled to open fall 1999;

- Aladdin, 2,600 rooms, $1 billion, scheduled to open spring 2000. The company is currently looking for a new partner for a second hotel that would cost $250 million and include 1,000 rooms.

Bellagio has been nearly five years in the making and cost some $1.6 billion - up from an original projection of $1.3 billion.

A major feature of the resort is the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, the showplace for a $300 million collection of fine art Wynn has cornered, featuring works of masters such as Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir and Picasso.

The hotel sits on the site of the old Dunes hotel, which Wynn imploded in a fiery display in October 1993.

Wynn had kept the new property under wraps, allowing only a handful of media to tour the resort. Celebrities and casino customers are scheduled in Friday and Saturday, with media from around the world in Sunday.

archive