While we wouldn't rule anything out, the Las Vegas market is fairly glutted with extended-stay hotels. As for casino companies that have dabbled in the timeshare market, they have tended to get burnt. City of Las Vegas Public Information Officer Jace Radke says the city is "not aware" of any such conversions in the pipeline.
The prospects for such makeovers are relatively limited. Binion's Gambling Hall has closed its hotel rooms and won't be remodeling them anytime soon, thanks to the costly asbestos-removal process this will entail. The motel portion of the defunct Western casino sits derelict out – far out – on the eastern fringe of downtown. While Tony Hsieh's Downtown Project may make something of it yet, the Western sits in a neighborhood so rough that even LVA Publisher Anthony Curtis, a pretty tough customer, is leery of visiting it.
The Downtown Project's director of public relations, Maria Phelan, says, "We currently use The Western as an events space. We don't have any other plans for it at this time."
We tried, without success, to get Binion's owner Terry Caudill on the phone. However, we think conversion of the Binion's hotel into timeshares is a very long shot indeed. For one thing, the rooms would have to be drastically enhanced and expanded, which doesn't come cheap. For another, a Caudill-led effort to remake Binion's started well but petered out from an apparent cash shortage, so we rather doubt he has pockets deep enough to run his casinos (he also owns the Four Queens) and take a flyer into the condo business, especially since downtown condos have been an iffy proposition: better of late but a real struggle in the early going.
That leaves the Las Vegas Club, but co-owner Derek Stevens is being very tight-lipped about his plans for that block, which he has consolidated by purchasing and closing the Mermaids and La Bayou casinos, and Glitter Gulch strip joint. Some kind of major tear-down-and-rebuild seems to be in the offing but Stevens keeps a good poker face. He has promised "a project that’s bigger and a different scope" than its predecessors but that's as far as he'll go right now.
Also, casinos and traditional hotels are making a comeback downtown. Gambling revenue was up 6 percent last year (and up 13 percent in May of this year, at the same time the Strip was in a 12 percent swoon). Through April, hotel occupancy has risen 3 percent and room rates are up 11 percent. If numbers like those continue to hold up, market forces will swing the pendulum back toward traditional hotels.
