Question of the Day - 30 April 2018

We confess we’re a bit mystified by the oxymoron “non-gaming casino.” After all, take gambling out of a Strip casino and you’ve basically got a really big hotel with a lot of restaurants and resort fees.

Although casino executives like to downplay gambling by touting the statistic that hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip derive 70% of their revenue from non-gaming sources (rooms, dining, retail, nightclubs, pool parties, etc.), they're hardly wheeling out the slot machines and throwing the roulette wheels into the dumpster.

Meanwhile, non-gaming hotels on the Strip are so few in number that they can be counted on the fingers of one hand: Vdara, Mandarin Oriental, and Trump International. They all pre-date 2009, so we certainly don’t see a trend developing. (They were intended to double as condo towers, but only partially succeeded in that respect.)

Of the megaresorts currently on the drawing board, Resorts World Las Vegas is going to be targeted toward Chinese gamblers and the Drew (formerly Fontainebleau), despite its planned 60 (sic!) restaurants, will duly have a casino. And given the existing two-dozen-plus major casinos that line both sides of the Strip, we see the likelihood of an equal number of non-gambling resort-hotels occupying the Strip as nil.