Casinos feud over New Year's failures

One year ago one of the world's most prominent fireworks companies pitched the idea that Las Vegas casinos should stage the world's largest fireworks show on the Strip on New Year's Eve.

The pitch, made by New York firm Fireworks by Grucci, would have cost an estimated $2 million. The proposal, made in meetings of Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority members, called for fireworks to be fired in sequence from 21 locations along the Strip from Sahara Avenue to Russell Road.

As midnight neared, each location would fire in turn -- a fireworks countdown to 2000, working its way along the Strip.

The plan was vetoed by Strip casinos. It was a decision that's made some operators and observers shaking their heads in disbelief, though the Strip's major players defend the call.

"For a little under $100,000 a property, we could have had the biggest fireworks display in the world," said Jonathan Swain, general manager of the Hard Rock hotel-casino and a former executive at the Tropicana. "But we didn't, and that's a shame."

Swain made his comments last week during the American Gaming Lodging and Leisure Summit.

"That was just an enormous blunder," said Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor newsletter, which tracks travel trends. "This was the world watching, and we just came off stale like an old piece of bread. It was like going back to old fuddy-duddy Las Vegas.

"We were set back a lot more than the $2 million would have cost."

But two of the Strip's most powerful companies -- Mandalay Resort Group and Mirage Resorts Inc. -- remain adamant that the fireworks simply weren't necessary.

"(Visitors) would have come without the fireworks," said Glenn Schaeffer, president of Mandalay Resort Group, who said he was unaware of the Grucci proposal. "Turning Las Vegas into a block party is not a solution.

"People don't come to Las Vegas for the fireworks."

But while major cities across the globe, such as Sydney, Australia; Seoul, South Korea; Paris; London; and Washington, D.C., garnered heavy worldwide television coverage of fireworks-laden midnight celebrations, coverage of midnight in Las Vegas was sporadic at best.

"If we had any brains, we'd put on these events to rival cities like Paris," said Robert Goldstein, president of the Venetian hotel-casino -- a property that did not participate in the LVCVA fireworks discussion.

"Certainly, everyone recognizes that the destination would have received more coverage had we proceeded (with fireworks)," said Rob Powers, spokesman for the LVCVA. "Having said that, there's consensus among the resort community and the LVCVA that ... it was a successful New Year's for Las Vegas."

Strip operators and the LVCVA were left scrambling in the weeks before New Year's after sky-high room rates drove off many potential customers -- a strategy Schaeffer called "misguided," though he also blamed jitters over the Y2K bug.

Curtis believes the lack of fireworks made a bad situation even worse.

"All it did was add insult to injury," Curtis said. "Not only did they charge ridiculous prices, but nothing happened (at midnight)."

Visitor numbers never reached the super-optimistic levels expected earlier, but by engaging in wholesale price cutting, Las Vegas hotels were able to achieve 91 percent occupancy, the LVCVA said.

The final outcome varied by property. Mandalay Resort Group stock fell more than 20 percent in January after the company warned fourth-quarter earnings would be hurt by low holiday demand. But other companies, such as Harrah's and Mirage, have insisted they reached capacity on the holiday.

Powers said Grucci first approached Las Vegas about the show in early 1999.

Grucci has experience putting on shows on New Year's -- on New Year's 1998, it put on elaborate shows at the Rio, the Stratosphere and the Luxor.

Several dozen property representatives attended a meeting with Grucci representatives in the spring to listen to their pitch for a megashow up and down the Strip, Powers said.

"The feedback we got was that the hotels had already spent considerable sums of money on their own entertainment for their guests, and quite frankly, there was not a strong appetite to proceed with that fireworks show," Powers said.

Swain used harsher language to describe the decision, claiming that some executives were bragging that the New Year's event would be a big money maker, regardless of a fireworks show.

"I watched the egos of the casino operators ... they were saying, 'We don't need to do this,' " Swain said.

But Alan Feldman, spokesman for Mirage Resorts Inc., said the price was just too high, particularly since Strip properties were already spending millions of dollars on their own entertainment offerings. He didn't recall whether the company making the presentation was Grucci.

"There was no operational plan ... they left that to God knows who," Feldman said. "There were a lot of big adjectives in the proposal, but there was no real plan of how to do this.

"Our best customers would have never seen it. The people who would have seen it would have been standing out in the street. I realize people out in the street were looking for something else, and I'm sorry if the (Bellagio) fountains and the (Mirage) volcano and the (Paris Las Vegas) Eiffel Tower ... didn't suffice."

Though the high-rollers were attending indoor parties, Curtis believes the city damaged its reputation by not meeting visitor and national media expectations of fireworks at midnight.

"I think the worldwide coverage in general ... even the media scrambled. 'There's nothing to show, so let's get the hell out of here,' " he said.

Manny Cortez, president of the LVCVA, has said Strip operators spent $60 million on entertainment on New Year's Eve. On a January appearance on POV Vegas, a Las Vegas Sun television news discussion show aired on cable channel Las Vegas 1, Cortez vowed the fireworks would return on Dec. 31, 2000.

"Frankly, we were outdone by the rest of the world," Cortez said. "I don't think that'll happen again."

Swain said he thinks the town missed a golden opportunity.

"I don't think we'll ever have an opportunity to fix that," he said. "The biggest P.R. fiasco in this city's history was New Year's Eve 2000."

archive