Las Vegas is set to come out of COVID-19 better than ever | Lifestyle

0
79

More than a year after the COVID-19 pandemic, this desert city looks bigger, bolder and better than ever.

New casino resorts, innovative restaurants, expanded meeting rooms and unique cultural destinations characterize the latest version of Las Vegas, which is reinventing itself again and again despite the adverse circumstances.

Heck, Elon Musk even built an underground tunnel and transportation system that will be opening soon.

Sure, the city is struggling like any other tourist destination in the first year of the pandemic. Recent figures from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) show that visitor traffic has dropped nearly 54% since February 2020 and some older casino resorts have not reopened after closing their doors last spring.

Overall, however, Vegas is healing thanks to a revival of old standards and a transfusion of new blood. The city is ready for more visitors as rampant vaccinations make travel less risky for many Americans.

“Not only is there pent-up demand for travel, but there is pent-up demand for the unrivaled Vegas experience,” said Lori Nelson-Kraft, LVCVA senior vice president of communications. “We expect the visits to Vegas get stronger every month.”

Pandemic casino boom

Any discussion of the newest and greatest in Las Vegas needs to start with the city’s newest casino resorts.

The newest entry, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, opened on March 25th in a redesigned version of the off-strip area that used to be the Hard Rock Casino Hotel.

This property has more than 1,500 rooms, a 60,000 square meter casino, a concert hall with 4,500 seats and an extensive pool area with a resort pool, a Mykonos-themed day club and an event area. While keeping Nobu and some of the same restaurants as its predecessor, the resort also added a number of new ones, including One Steakhouse by brothers David and Michael Morton.

If these aren’t enough reasons to visit the new resort, Richard “Boz” Bosworth, President and CEO of parent company JC Hospitality, noted that Virgin has no resort fees, free parking and free WiFi, all rarities in the market.

“We really wanted to establish ourselves as something completely different from the start,” he said. “I think we achieved that goal.”

In October 2020, Sin City welcomed another unique newcomer: Circa Resort & Casino.

This 35-story, 777-room resort is the first new downtown Las Vegas casino in more than 40 years. The highlights: a legendary steakhouse, one of the largest and most spectacular sports books in town and a pool terrace with stadium-style lounge terraces. (The pool is actually called “Stadium Swim”.)

Circa is the brainchild of Derek Stevens, a casino magnate who also owns the Golden Gate Hotel & Casino on the other side of Fremont Street and D Las Vegas a few blocks east. Stevens was the first local hotelier to set up a Bitcoin ATM on his casino floor (in D). He was one of the first casino operators to open sports books around the clock. Most nights he puts on a shiny blazer and spends a few hours hanging out with customers at his bars.

Other new attractions

While new casinos represent the most exciting developments in Las Vegas over the past year, the city has also unveiled other attractions during the pandemic.

First, in December LVCVA completed a $ 989 million expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center that adds 1.4 million square feet of new space to the existing 3.2 million square foot campus.

The new excavation, dubbed West Hall, is on strip-side properties formerly inhabited by the Riviera and Landmark hotels and has 328,000 square feet of pillar-free space, the largest such space in North America. The facility will be officially opened to the public this June at World of Concrete, the first major convention to return to Las Vegas since its closure.

This new meeting room is connected to the existing convention center via the Convention Center Loop, a $ 52.5 million underground tunnel system designed and built by The Boring Co., one of billionaire Elon Musk’s many business units .

The pedestrian shuttle takes congress participants from one facility to another in two one-way tunnels 40 feet underground. The Chariots: all-electric Tesla vehicles that travel at 35 miles per hour.

The city has approved plans to expand the loop throughout the destination and connect the convention center to the strip resorts and the airport. No schedule has been announced yet.

On the west side of Interstate 15, a new attraction called AREA15 calls itself the “Experience Entertainment District” and offers live events, monumental art installations, extraordinary design elements, immersive technology, retail, bars, restaurants and more.

Put another way, Winston Fisher, AREA15 CEO, said he sees his new venture as a “content box” where visitors can come to “create memories” and an excursion they cannot get anywhere else in town .

Growth of the restaurant scene

Surprisingly, the Las Vegas food scene grew during the pandemic.

Perhaps the most notable addition: Al Solito Posto, Chef James Trees’ newest restaurant.

Trees, a James Beard Award finalist last year for his work at Esther’s Kitchen in the city’s Arts District, opened Al Solito in the suburb of Tivoli Village as a venue for Las Vegas residents to sample classic Italian dishes like chicken parmesan and rigatoni alla vodka, which you might find on the east coast.

“For many of my customers with connections to the east coast, that’s the food [at Al Solito] is like the stuff your grandmother made, ”Trees said.

Other notable additions to the dining scene in and around the city include Din Tai Fung, a dumpling noodle house in Aria known for its Shanghai-style soup dumplings made with kurobuta pork. Delilah, an Art Deco dinner club in the Wynn; Vegas Test Kitchen, a pop-up restaurant incubator in downtown Las Vegas; and Milpa, a healthy Mexican restaurant near Spring Valley that has hearty roasted vegetable peels, tetelas, and tacos.

Even more new restaurants are on the way.

At the horizon

The trend of development in Las Vegas is not stopping anytime soon.

The city is eagerly awaiting the completion of Resorts World Las Vegas, a sprawling casino resort owned by Singapore-based Genting.

Located northwest of Wynn and Encore, this property is slated to open this summer and has an Asian theme. It will also feature several standout food and drink options, including a Singapore-style hawker food market (with a restaurant by Trees) and an outpost of Wally’s Wine and Spirits, a popular wine bar with locations in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.

Also available: The Majestic, a new non-gaming, nonsmoking project on six acres practically across from the new West Hall of the convention center. When this property opens in 2024, it will include a five-star hotel, an open-air piazza with five restaurants, a spa, and more.

The lesson here is simple. No matter what the world throws at humanity, never bet against Las Vegas.