Part 2 of the post Star Trek Las Vegas Hilton
Getting back to Star Trek: The Experience, don’t blame Paramount parent CBS Consumer Products for its demise: The studio offshoot wanted to keep it going and was the moving force behind attempts to revive the attraction elsewhere. True, the exhibit had rested on some its laurels a bit too long — one of the motion rides (“Klingon Encounter”) climaxed with out-of-date footage of the Las Vegas Strip, shot in 1995, showing the Sands hotel-casino still standing.
(A year ago, local blogger Robin Leach reported that ST:TE would find a new home at Caesars Entertainment’s LINQ Promenade — which hardly seemed to have the necessary infrastructure — but nothing materialized.)
As indicated earlier, the Hilton was hard-put to fill the space left by The Experience after the attraction closed on September 1, 2008. Colony held the mortgage on Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch and there was some loose talk of a Jackson-themed nightclub going into the vast Star Trek space.
The subsequent vacancy boded ill for the Las Vegas Hilton’s fortunes, which continued to decline through the Colony Capital era, bottoming out with a thud on June 29, 2011, when it was disclosed that Hilton Hotels was stripping the property of its Hilton flag — the most drastic step possible in the realm of hotel franchises.
Colony CEO Tom Barrack’s minions tried shopping the property to other brand-name franchisers, insisting they’d have something by year’s end. They failed and the property was generically renamed LVH: Las Vegas Hotel & Casino. Hilton never made the reasons for its rupture with Colony public, but considering that it also stripped the Colony-owned Atlantic City Hilton of its brand name, a drastic falloff in quality was implied. Revocation of a “flag” in the hotel industry is not done frequently or lightly.
Having borrowed $252 million from Goldman Sachs, using the now-LVH as collateral, Colony began defaulting on the loans. Goldman initiated foreclosure proceedings in September 2011 and 11 months later, the gavel fell at a foreclosure auction and Goldman was the new owner. The property limped along in its nondescript post-Colony fashion until Goldman sold it to Westgate Resorts in mid-2014. The latter immediately removed the LVH marquee and rebranded the property Westgate Las Vegas. It also began a renovation of rooms, transforming some into timeshares, and sinking significant capital into a Suzanne Somers-branded spa and lounge show.
The transformation has not been without its difficulties (of which more below), but the change from Generic Big Hotel to Westgate Las Vegas has been largely for the better. Westgate handles hotel and timeshare operations at the property and Diana Bennett’s Paragon Gaming runs the casino. Unfortunately, entertainment programming falls between these stools and Westgate has had trouble keeping anything in place for long, including the multi-faceted business relationship with Somers, which only lasted a few months.
The offering of “Graceland Presents ELVIS: The Exhibition-The Show-The Experience” got off to a rocky start when the tribute-show part of the trifecta closed after only a few weeks. The museum, full of Graceland memorabilia, had a 10-year contract, but only lasted 10 months. Westgate abruptly shuttered it in February 2016, putting the Presley souvenirs in protective custody. As Westgate LV Chief Operating Officer Michael Waltrip explained to R-J columnist Norm Clarke, "They owe us quite a substantial amount of money for the improvements we made on the space. Unfortunately they took a heavy-handed move. They were threatening to default, so we had to close the premises and protect the asset."
Other misfortunes on the entertainment front included having Raiding the Rock Vault raided by the Tropicana and funk group Cameo having to close its lounge show after a death in the family. Stabilizing the entertainment program at the Hilton/Westgate remains an elusive goal.
Chances of a revival of The Experience well and truly died in April 2010, when roughly 1,000 artifacts from ST:TE were put on sale by Propworx, with prices ranging from $10 to $800. "Among the items for sale are three large models of spaceships in need of repair or restoration -- the U.S.S. Enterprise A, the U.S.S. Voyager and the [Klingon] Bird of Prey -- as well as a replica of the Enterprise bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation,” reported Oskar Garcia of the Associated Press.
"Anything like this, you’re sad to see it go, but on the other hand it’s an opportunity for fans to preserve the stuff. It’s an opportunity for the studio to get it in the hands of people who made it great,” Propworx CEO Alec Peters told LVA.
