Two interesting, separate things happened in Las Vegas in the past week that somehow interconnected, and just goes to show you why Sin City was, is, and will always remain the ultimate tourist destination as it continually reinvents itself.
The first thing - So, uh, when is 1996 considered old? When the hotel powerhouse MGM Resorts International says it is, that's when. The company announced it will partner with the Sydell Group to completely renovate, rebrand and reimagine the Monte Carlo Hotel and Resort in Vegas in a $450 million project.
(A moment of silence please. After all, she was just 20 years old).
Also this week, legendary hotel/casino owner Steve Wynn said he doesn't think too highly of 20-something millennials - even going so far as to call them "morons" - but he's happy to take their money at his uber-successful nightclubs.
Of course he is.
Wynn is a visionary, and that's where our two stories collide.
MGM is redoing the Monte Carlo into two separate hotels, the larger, 2,700-room Park MGM and the smaller, 292-room NoMad Hotel (not unlike, it should be noted, what Wynn himself did with the Wynn Hotel and the neighboring Encore).
These days in Las Vegas, it's not about gambling. More than half the country is within a 90-minute drive of a legal casino these days. No, this is about what Wynn calls "experiential value."
Wynn made his remarks as part of his keynote address at the International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking at the Mirage Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
"The pattern is this: Gaming is a passive activity. It has no value. One roulette table is exactly the same as every other damn roulette table," Wynn said. "A gaming room has no dynamic value. It's strictly a receptacle, a cash register. The driver in our business is the non-casino activity. The driver in our business is the experiential value of the enterprise."
Such as nightclubs, which brought in more than $40 million last year to Wynn-owned hotels.
Vegas nightclubs such as XS, Hakkasan, Hyde and more - and the accompanying headline DJs such as Calvin Harris, Deadmau5 and others - are a big draw for the 20-something crowd, many of whom have no intention of going anywhere except the club, the pool and a place to eat.
The casino?
Just a place to cut through on the way to their intended destination.
But, hey, God love 'em, right? Morons, as Wynn said, though they might be.
"But in the meantime, we're doing well with them. We put the little darlings in the nightclubs," Wynn said. "It's probably the only part of the business where I have cognitive dissonance. I walk into the clubs and I say to myself, either we have attracted every moron in the world, or there's something about the sound that allows normal people to check their human sensibilities at the door."
I'm not an expert on the social habits of millennials, but I will say this - Wynn is right about the non-gaming part. A few years ago I was fortunate to meet and talk with nightclub impresario Sean Christie and he left an indelible quote with me - at the worst of the economic downturn in the late 2000s, "nightclubs saved Las Vegas," Christie said. Nightclubs still attracted the 20-something crowd if they felt like they were getting something out of the experience instead of just gambling money away.
Experiential value.
Wynn himself saw this coming 26 years ago when he opened the Mirage, complete with its volcano and garden atrium and "Siegfried & Roy" show, and its arena that attracted big stars and even bigger fights. Gambling was almost secondary.
This is what the new Park MGM will be like a little more than two years from now after the Monte Carlo reinvention. MGM Resorts said the new Park MGM "was conceived to target a younger, well-traveled demographic seeking unique experiences and innovative design. Park MGM will appeal to this growing audience's desire to be more social, connected and culturally aware."
Or, translated, produce experiences more tangible than just a "Sex and the City" slot machine.
Say what you want about Las Vegas, but this is a town that knows its own brand and its customer base better than any other tourist destination in the world.
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