Caesars Entertainment spokesman Gary Thompson responds, "The occupancy rates we and others in the industry announce are based on the total number of rooms at a property."
MGM Resorts International representative Alan Feldman doesn’t entirely agree. First, he says two issues have gotten conflated here. "The number of rooms held aside by Casino Marketing virtually all get used or given back to the front desk to sell. There are usually only a few that go unused from the [comped] casino block," he says.
"As for non-useable rooms [emphasis added], that number varies depending on circumstances. Very few (usually fewer than 10 a day) are taken out of service for maintenance. That can change during a remodel, when entire floors or partial floors may be taken out of service. In those circumstances, we disclose those numbers in quarterly reporting and adjust the occupancy so that a comparison can be made to prior performance" … apples to apples, as it were, which is a bit different from Caesars’ methodology for calculating occupancy.
While repair or deep-cleaning issues might keep 10-12 rooms out of inventory per day, according to Boyd Gaming spokesman David Strow, "an empty room still has fixed overhead costs, so you want to strive to keep those as close to 100% occupancy as possible." In other words, empty or not, it’s still costing money to keep that room clean, air-conditioned and otherwise maintained. As for comped rooms, those can always be put back into inventory on short notice in the event of a no-show. (When pressed on how many rooms Boyd holds in reserve for comped players, Strow declined to comment, citing concerns over proprietary information.)
Bottom line: If a hotel like Aria has 4,000 rooms, with a very few exceptions, they’re on the market, day in, day out.
