Any word on how the Palms has been doing since it reopened under Native American ownership?
[Editor's Note: This answer is penned by David McKee.]
Yes, there is and it’s mostly not good. Native American tribes don’t have to share their financial results and usually don’t. (Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun share some revenue data with Connecticut, but that’s exceptional.) So we’re operating with limited transparency.
As a consequence, we're reduced to omens, but they’re none too promising. The big, flashing, red light is that the Palms has been through three general managers in less than two years. That's never a good sign.
The Palms reopened after COVID and a disastrous stint as a Station Casino in April 2022. At the time, Vegas-savvy Cynthia Kiser Murphy was the GM and she steered the place for 26 months, restoring some old favorites like Ghostbar. Increasingly, her tenure was beset by rumblings that the Palms wasn't performing as well as the San Manuel Band would have liked.
Sure enough, Kiser Murphy resigned in June 2024. At the time, the casino’s vice president of casino operations got the axe, which tells you that the gambling floor wasn’t performing up to snuff.
The Palms cost the San Manuel Band $650 million and was generating a return on investment rumored to be in the neighborhood of $30 million a year or 4.6 percent, a pretty dire number for a casino. (And $30 million was probably a generous estimate.)
The Palms was rudderless for two months, when San Manuel landed new GM Steve Thayer. He'd gotten the chop from The Strat the same time that Kiser Murphy gave the Palms her notice. So he was available and not conflicted. He also presumably knew the market, having been with Caesars Entertainment for 15 years (i.e., long before it was renamed Caesars) prior to jumping ship to The Strat.
Thayer lasted 10 months. Unlike Kiser Murphy’s, his departure was immediate and unceremonious. VitalVegas reported, “Thayer’s bosses didn’t like a decision he made” and left it at that. Not even waiting for a new broom, the Palms cleaned house, evicting Mabel’s, Vetri Cucina, Laguna Pool House, and Rojo Lounge.
Following the Thayer departure, San Manuel looked in-house, promoting assistant general manager Kevin Glass to the top job (after four months without a GM). He’s no stranger to troubled properties, having worked at Cosmopolitan, the Downtown Grand, and SLS (now the Sahara once again).
It’s not easy to be a lone-wolf operator in Las Vegas. Witness the hiccups from the Rio and Virgin. But things have been pretty quiet since Glass took the helm. No news from the Palms tends to be good news.
The San Manuel Band’s player base is California-centric, which can be a handicap in these days of far-flung, hub-and-spoke, business models. They’ve always had their work cut out for them at the Palms and we hope for the best. It used to be one of the cutting-edge casinos in Sin City, before George Maloof overextended himself and lost the place. Can it regain forefront status? Possibly. But the odds are daunting.
