When will Main Street Station reopen?
And: Any updates on when Main Street Station will return?
And: When/if Main Street Station reopens, will the buffet reopen too?
And: Is it true that Boyd is wanting to sell the now shuttered Main Street Station? If not, what are Boyd’s plan for the casino?
As you can see, we receive a lot of questions about Main Street Station -- more, in fact, than all the other still-shuttered hotel-casinos combined, including the Palms. From time to time, we check in with Boyd for updates, but they're sticking with their story.
To wit: “The reopening of Main Street depends on the return of demand from Hawaiian visitors," says company spokesman David Strow. "We’ve previously said we expect that to happen in the second half of this year.”
Visitation from Hawaii is drastically down, due in large part to COVID-19 restrictions in the Aloha State. Boyd has made no bones about this in communications with investors. During its closure, Main Street Station has doubled as a COVID-vaccination site.
On our frequent excursions downtown, we pop in to Boyd's other casinos and generally find the Fremont and California to be less crowded than their rivals, Circa and the D. Thus, we can sympathize with Boyd's reluctance to open MSS minus its faithful Hawaiian customer base.
That being said, a sale, to us, would be out of the question, not least because it would introduce another competitor to downtown. Nor would Boyd want to reduce its room inventory when good times return.
So for the moment, anyway, it makes business sense to keep Main Street Station on the back burner. But when it does reopen, it will almost certainly do so under the Boyd umbrella and given the Garden Court Buffet's popularity, we assume that it, too, will return eventually.
{{{sigh}}}