Hard rock casino las vegas closing
Its been about a year since the Seminole Indian Tribe owner of the Hard Rock International brand bought the Mirage and longer since it announced plans to transform the iconic Strip property, but you wouldnt notice any changes from Las Vegas Boulevard.
Avid Vegas watchers may have to wait longer for more visible changes. Hard Rock officials have stayed tight-lipped about how they plan to turn the Polynesian-themed property into a music-themed gambling mecca, letting plans come to the public through public development meetings and company town halls. Heres what we know, and dont know, about the Mirages transition to Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas.
What we know
Hard Rock acquired The Mirages operations from casino giant MGM Resorts International in December for more than $1 billion in cash. (But plans were announced a year before that.) Casino landlord Vici Properties owns The Mirages real estate and has said its lease with Hard Rock calls for initial annual rent of $90 million.
Hard Rock International officials want to change the Strip skyline with a guitar-shaped hotel tower. The foot tall all-suite tower, with a podium below it, received planning approval from Clark County officials during a March meeting. The proposed tower is designed to resemble back-to-back guitars with brightly lit strings and would feature floor-to-ceiling glass panes, Hard Rock attorneys told county officials in planning documents at the time. The design resembles a similar, but smaller, guitar-shaped hotel tower in Florida.
The beloved volcano still erupting for eager crowds will be nixed once the new hotel tower plans are firmed up.
But that final vision isnt expected for some time. When the project begins its expected to take as many as 30 months to complete. Hard Rock CEO Jim Allen said he hoped the project will open sometime in late or early , according to a company town meeting held on May 25 in Atlantic City.
The new ownership also plans to build new casino areas, retail spaces, restaurants with outdoor seating, a nightclub and a day club, additional back of house areas and more, according to plans submitted to the county.
To build new outdoor spaces, officials will remove the existing Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. When asked about the demolition work beginning in the propertys southwest corner, where the animal habitat was, Mirage President Joe Lupo said in a statement: We have simply begun preliminary activity for the transformation of the closed animal habitat areas, that have not been utilized for the last 6 months.
Theyll also remove some existing pool structures to remodel more than 45, square feet of pool surface area.
Other indoor plans call for an expansion of the live theater and ballroom space and a low-rise expansion along the south side of the property.
Resort officials previously said when the resort expansion is complete, the casino will be enlarged from 94, square feet to , square feet while the convention space will grow from , square feet to , square feet. The theater will go from 3, theater seats to 6, and 18 food and beverage outlets to
What we dont know
We still dont know when they want to break ground on the guitar-shaped tower. Company officials declined to comment further about how long the property will continue to operate as the Mirage and a spokesperson said the company was still designing and developing the construction plans.
Hard Rock officials have at least two more years to operate the Mirage brand royalty-free, according to the three-year brand agreement announced during the deal.
What remains unknown is just how Hard Rock chooses to execute its plans. Brendan Bussmann, an industry analyst and founder of Las Vegas-based B Global, said project management is likely the complicating factor.
Construction becomes very much like a ballet trying to navigate that and get timing of delivering of steel and concrete, all those things in place as you want to keep a road open, keep your porte-cochere going and things like that, Bussmann said. Its difficult to do.
Other properties on the Strip have undergone rebrands in recent years. Most recently, Caesars Entertainment transformed Ballys into Horseshoe Las Vegas in a renovation that was completed in December MGM Resorts International, meanwhile, renovated the former Monte Carlo into its new look, Park MGM, over roughly a year and a half with the brands official relaunch occurring in May
Expect Hard Rocks transition to be more challenging, Bussmann said. Resort officials wont fully close the property during the rebrand, meaning the construction schedule will have to align with the best opportunities to take hotel floors offline or to change the ingress and egress once new building begins.
Its one thats gonna take some more ingenuity in figuring out how to keep the trains running while building a new station, he said.
McKenna Ross is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Contact her at [email protected] Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.