The Roger Thomas ShowS are UP!

I had some sort of bizarre problem with TheStripPodcast.Com just as Amy and I were heading off to Utah to take in some not-Shakespeare at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, so for the moment, the bare minimum is on the site. But I did manage to post the proper episode of The Strip with Roger Thomas as well as a narrated video slideshow of the tour I took of Wynn Design & Development last week.

There's lots of goodies in both, and you can hear by clicking on the links I just provided or save the files by right-clicking to watch/hear later.

Among those goodies, the real headline was Roger's reaction to the earlier leaked photos of the Bellagio room redesign that were posted on VegasTripping.Com. In the past, neither Roger nor Steve Wynn have been willing to critique the design stewardship of their first masterpiece resort, so I sent Thomas the VT pix with the identifying information cut off. I hoped Roger would say, "Holy crud, what is THAT?" but instead he recognized some of the architectural elements that he created for those rooms.

Then he critiqued them anyway. Here's the exchange:

Friess: I think a lot of people when they look at that are really surprised that that is Bellagio.

Roger: I’m not. I think it’s consistent with the design that their management always seems to pursue. It’s almost as if they haven’t noticed that they’re in Bellagio. When you're in a guest room, you can pretty much get away with that. I like our guest rooms to be a natural progression and part of the whole. If you can get away with ignoring where you are in a hotel, you can usually get away with that in a guest room. I don’t think they’ve done that as successfully at Bellagio with the buffet and with several of the restaurants that are kind of a slap in the face of the space they’re in. They don’t feel terribly well integrated to me. [But] when you go through a small door to enter a space, what's within can be a greater change than a very wide opening to another space.

Friess: When you look at these pictures, the Bellagio was such a personal project for you. Does it not rankle you to see what they've done with it?

Roger: No. I get to wake up every morning and make my dreams come true. If someone decides they have a better idea, I just let it go. I'm so busy and focused on creating new and better environments for Wynn Resorts, frankly if someone changes things and I'm not really a fan of what they've done, i just look at it as they've made themselves easier for me to compete with.

Friess: Boy, you're catty this morning.

Roger: It's not catty. Actually, having said that, I think there are some very comfortable things about this room. I notice for one thing that they're now using an intelligent service for the snack service that looks exactly like the way we designed ours with the stepped up presentation. And there are a lot of things, they've got a patterned sheer over a blackout which is, you know, something we started doing. I think there are a lot of things about this room that look very considerate and like they're very aware of what the guests needs. ... I haven't sensed the room 360-degrees, but it looks like they approached it in a fairly sensitive way and that there's good consistency in many of the design decisions that they made in terms of design style. Would I have made any of those decisions? Probably not, but that's besides the point.

Friess: You made the comment about the Buffet, and I haven't been in the buffet in quite a long time. They've redesigned it since you folks left?

Roger: They did, and the facade of it is kind of an extreme mismatch for the environment which surrounds it. I think that's intentional. I just don't think it was successful.

There's plenty more, including Roger's praise of Chuck from VegasTripping and the revelation that Jerry Beale, the designer brought in to replace Roger when Roger was supposed to leave the company, has departed for Los Angeles. So check out all the fun stuff.

P.S. I'm going to wait until after this Utah trip to get the 3-minute narrated slideshow up in which Roger explains the artistic significance and intricacies of the $12.8 million vases the company recently bought.

A Bellagio Adventure

If you followed Twitter and the blogosphere yesterday, you'll know that I was at Bellagio yesterday getting an opportunity thanks to an insider friend to take a look at the recently redesigned rooms. I Tweeted out the first photo and even fielded questions from VegasTripping.Com's Chuck Monster about whether the rooms were actually occupied yet.

And then, lo and behold, within about an hour of that very query, Chuck posted his own breathless EXCLUSIVE!!! -- and can never again mock Robin Leach, natch! -- of photos from the same room. Obviously, this miffed me, but Chuck privately insisted that it was a total coincidence and that one his contributors happened to be checking in at the very same time I was there. I didn't so much mind being scooped -- OK, I hate that very much -- but it was the nyah-nyah of his original post (which began, simply, "Sorry, Steve!" and was later replaced with something obsequious) that was weird and juvenile and made me happy to be heading out soon. Lord knows, I was the one who taught Chuck never to sit too long on a scoop (See: Twerps, Twitter), so I couldn't really be that upset if he had had this stuff in his arsenal and put it out before me. Check out their material here.

In private, Chuck insisted no snark or sucker-punch was intended and that this was all just a big, fortunate-for-him surprise. And I have no choice but to believe him, despite the fact that he continues to deny me the benefit of the doubt and sticks even now to his accusation that my regretfully laudatory August column on the Twerps was actually a sellout of everything I stand for in the service of acquiring some Twitter followers. (It's hard to follow logic, but hey, whatcha gonna do?)

Any which way, I got to see the rooms, too. The 27th and 28th floors are now done and the 25th and 26th are out of service while they are renovated. And while earlier images showed the green editions of the rooms with hideous wallpaper that I was later told would be discarded, I think we can assume that everything you see here is just green in the green version. I did manage to look in the entrance of the green-decor'd rooms, too, and there's one shot in the slideshow of that.

I'll say this: As much as everyone wants to bash on it, I actually liked it. It was comfortable. I think I'd prefer the blue more than the same in green, but once they got rid of the horrid Golden Girls wallpaper, I think it improved vastly.

You'll be able to hear what Bellagio's original designer, Roger Thomas, thought of all this soon when the podcast episode is up -- he's not charitable -- but, again, it's a matter of opinion. Somehow I suspect some of the Wynn acolytes would be praising the heck out of this if Thomas had created it, just because it's him and whatever Bellagio does is anti-Roger/Steve.

Meanwhile, a few changes afoot in the lobby. First, they're about to open a Hermes and Omega stores.Hermes replaces...well, I think it's just removing some gaming space, and Omega replaces the no-longer-necessary CityCenter sales office.


The summertime Conservatory is nifty, but with Ferris Wheels being all the tacky rage on the Strip these days, this amused me:


Some other Conservatory visions:


That "portrait" above is based on this:


And, finally, I couldn't stay mad at Chuck for too long because, well, I got lucky at Bellagio, too. I started with $3 and..


So there.

Source: Bellagio Abandoning Awful Floral Wallpaper In Redesign

The Twitterverse, podosphere and blogland have been going nuts in the past week or so over photos leaked to VegasTripping.Com that show some fairly hideous design features for the redesigned basic rooms in the main Bellagio tower. A disgusted Chuck Monster of VegasTripping.Com, on the most recent episode of The Vegas Gang podcast, said it made the rooms look like they belong in the Stardust and others chimed in that it looked like something that would give Roger Thomas hives.

With good reason. That above and this...


...are pretty awful. Also, it reminds me of Blanche's bedroom in Golden Girls:


Well, I'm happy to report that a trusted MGM Resorts source tells me that even when the sample rooms were being shown to various employees, the staff was being told the designer herself had decided she didn't care for that wallpaper and that it would be replaced with something understated. No word yet what that choice is.

The rest of the furnishings and such, however, will be as these photos show them and actually look "pretty cool" in person, I am told. If you look at the pictures and imagine that wall print gone, the whole scheme is infinitely better if still not all that great.

The first floor of rooms come into circulation within 10 days, I am told. Starting last month, they are taking four floors out of commission at a time in the main tower and plan to completing/releasing a floor a week until December when they're all done. It's the first main-tower room redesign since before the Spa Tower opened, which puts it at about 7 years. That's letting things slide modestly, given the high-end Vegas standard is to redo the rooms every 5 years, but these haven't exactly been the flushest of times for MGM.

I tend to think that Chuck's analysis on Vegas Gang was fairly spot on: This is appears to be an effort to bring the Conservatory into the rooms the way Mirage has borrowed design motifs from the volcano. But, really, the pale greens and stripes and the clashes with the carpet do not feel sophisticated, and that will harm the Bellagio brand.

Still, at least someone had the wisdom to realize that wallpaper would be offensive in a Radisson, let alone in the best-loved and most iconic luxury resort on the Vegas Strip. Can't wait to see it for myself.

[Thanks to Chuck for permission to use these images. Check out a couple others on his site.]

The Show is UP: Ex-Harrah's CEO Phil Satre

New show, turned around really quick! Bill Harrah died 33 years ago today, so this is good timing. Enjoy. Click on the date below to play or right-click to save the show. Or you subscribe -- for free -- in iTunes or Zune and you'll always get it first. -sf

June 29: Phil Satre Is Not Harrahfied

This fall will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of William Harrah, the man whose name is on more casinos in the world than any other. His former company, which recently changed its name to Caesars Entertainment, has very little planned outside of some promotions at the original Harrah’s resort in Reno, but we decided he deserved a little more attention than that. Harrah died 33 years ago tomorrow at the age of 66, so Steve spoke with his successor, Phil Satre, who helmed Harrah’s for 21 years and is responsible for spreading that name around the world. Satre, who left Harrah’s in 2005 and is now the chairman of the board of IGT, talks about the quirks and visions that made the man what he was and then explains several decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s including the choice for the company to never build any new hotel-casinos in Las Vegas. Also, Steve introduces Satre to the term “Harrah-fy” and asks Satre whether he feels he degraded the quality of the resorts he acquired.

In Banter: Octavius, Plaza, Bellagio, Maloof, Hilton and an aquarium-related Vegas-set reality show.

Open & Banter: Start to 25ish
Phil Satre Part I: 26-58ish
Trivia/Poll/Letters: 58ish-1:06
Phil Satre Part II: 1:07-1:48ish
TSTToTW: 1:48-end

Links to stuff discussed:

A news report on the Plaza and the stuff they bought F-Blew
See pix of apparent Bellagio room redesign and hear Chuck and others pan it on the latest Vegas Gang show
VegasHappensHere with Flickr slideshow of Octavius Tower VIP suite and bathroom
Oprah on the toilets at the fancy Caesars Palace suites
Peter Greenberg Radio Show, which Steve is on on July 2
Hilton and Hilton Worldwide in conflict over franchise
Electric Daisy succeeded, says Las Vegas Weekly
Steve’s column on why Las Vegas missed the financial boat on gay marriage
Brian Greenspun’s column on the honorable, now-2% Palms owner George Maloof
The brief on TANKED on Animal Planet
The Sunbelt Car Collection can be seen, according to our TSTTotW from Sept. 25, 2009

The Show Is UP: Jean Philippe Maury, Yum!

Here we go, folks. And, FYI, if you download the show, I've started putting a time guide into the shownotes so you know where to skip ahead to if you're looking for something specific. Enjoy. Click on the date below to play or right-click to save the show. Or you subscribe -- for free -- in iTunes or Zune and you'll always get it first. -sf

May 5: A Sweet Show With A Bittersweet Ending

As any dessert lover knows, there are actually two Bellagio fountains, the one outside that gets all the attention and the one that flows of chocolate at the Jean Philippe Patisserie around the corner from the hotel’s famed Conservatory. The second one, which owns the Guinness record for the largest chocolate fountain, is the brainchild of our guest this episode, Jean Philippe Maury, the French pastry chef who now has shops in both Bellagio and Aria and is responsible for overseeing the pastry kitchen for all of Aria. We’ve got a delicious dish of a discussion up ahead in which Maury explains why he refuses to make low-calorie desserts, why most chefs are incapable of making a simple pie and why Steve and my wedding cake was so disgusting. Also, has Chef Maury ever used a Betty Crocker cake mix? And, in lieu of the Top Secret Tourist Tip of the Week, we have a major announcement regarding our future.

In Banter: Wedding mania in Vegas and elsewhere, transmania at the Cosmo, the Sahara shutdown begins and more.

Links to stuff discussed

Steve Wynn’s bizarre wedding video and wedding portrait
Steve’s AOL News piece on the pop-up casino
Doug Elfman’s piece from the Wynn pre-nuptial media event
Vegas UnCork’d website
Jean Phillippe Maury’s website
Scott Conant’s website
Steve’s blog post about his Knight-Wallace Fellowship in Michigan
Marie Osmond got re-married to her first husband
Marie’s doll collection site
Trump’s appearance at the Treasure Island resort by AFP
Steve’s blog post on the debunked Cosmo transgender “incident”
VegasTripping.Com on Sahara ending the roller coaster and the big Sahara jackpot drawing
Piero’s website

Irresistible Press Release Of The Month: Bellagio's Space Bunnies!

Classic. How long until Maury get to do the entire Bellagio Conservatory?!? -sf

GIANT CHOCOLATE SPACE BUNNIES INVADE BELLAGIO IN VEGAS

Renowned Pastry Chef Jean-Philippe Maury Showcases Otherworldly Skills with Debut of Giant “Space Bunnies” at Bellagio’s Jean Philippe Pâtisserie

Click to tweet: Breaking News: Giant Chocolate Space Bunnies Invade @BellagioLV in #Vegas! http://t.co/4mVhoEA #Easter

LAS VEGAS – April 12, 2011 – World renowned pastry chef Jean-Philippe Maury has raised the bar once again with the debut of larger-than life Space Bunnies at Bellagio’s Jean Philippe Pâtisserie, on display through Easter.

Sitting in a chocolate spaceship measuring eight feet in circumference, two Space Bunnies are dressed in edible flight suits and ready to operate flight controls that will take them to a dimension of the chocolate kind. Made from the finest Swiss chocolate, the only non-edible ingredients are working blinking lights that adorn the spacecraft. The out-of-this-world creation took Jean-Philippe and his team a month to complete.

Complementing his incredible Easter display, Jean-Philippe also is unveiling more than 45 Easter creations at Jean Philippe Pâtisserie in both ARIA Resort & Casino and Bellagio, including:

· Available in boy or girl versions, Jean-Philippe’s Bunny Cakes are a unique way to decorate the table while satisfying a sweet tooth. The boy is chocolate and the girl is fruitcake; they are available April 17 – April 24.

· Don’t forget about the sports fans. The Chocolate Basketball Bunny and his white chocolate ball are a slam dunk for Easter baskets. A Sports Bunny is also available for loved ones who cheer for multiple teams.

· It’s not all about the Easter Bunny this year; Jean-Philippe also has created a hand-shaped Chocolate Monkey and even a Hippopotamus. These hand-molded chocolates are the perfect gift for any unique Easter basket.

Is Cosmo Cooling Off?

Our old pal Robert LaFleur of Hudson Securities is back with another entry in his weekly Vegas rate tracking effort and there are some interesting indications that the well-received Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas may be starting to cool off just a tad.

Every week, LaFleur marks down the asking rates for basic rooms on Wednesdays and Saturdays over the coming three months. This way, he can see from week to week and over the course of the three-month period who is raising and dropping rates and by how much.

Among his findings:

* Cosmo lowered its rates on nine of the 17 dates checked in April and May and raised them on one day, 5/14, by $10. Among those changes, the rates for 4/9 and 4/27 plummeted more than $100 a night. You can click on the chart above to enlarge it and look for yourself. It's fun.

* Cosmo had far too low expectations for its own rates prior to the opening. When March rooms went on sale in November 2010, the weekend average was $276. The same rooms if booked in March cost $432, a 56% surge.

* Bellagio remains firmly ahead of Aria on price. This past Saturday -- amid a busy Vegas weekend with the ACMs and the NCAA Final Four -- Aria nonetheless slashed rates $110 to $269 while Bellagio raised them $70 to $299. That means that the prior week, the MGM pricing braintrust thought people would pay $379 for Aria rooms but only $229 at Bellagio. Apparently, they were quite wrong. It's almost as if they were using some pricing psychology to shunt guests towards Bellagio, which MGM owns 100%, instead of Aria, which it only owns half. Hmm.

* Meanwhile, Cosmo asked $395 for rooms on Saturday night. That's almost $100 more than Bellagio and $126 more than Aria.

* Asking prices for sad, stranded Vdara were knocked down for 11 of the 17 dates checked in April and May. On some Wednesdays, Vdara rooms go for as little as $105.

LaFleur also provided some interesting discussion of the impact of resort fees. MGM Resorts now has them at all their properties, having added Bellagio in January. Why do they do this if it so annoys people? Well, MGM will include the resort fee revenues in its first quarter earnings and that should help the company realize more than 10% growth, LaFleur predicted. MGM brass themselves have said if they had included resort fees during the fourth quarter of 2010, they would have announced a 2% increase in revenue rather than the 2% drop. That's big money.

By the way, LaFleur provided this handy guide to Vegas Strip resort fees, with the caveat that different hotels "provide" different amenities for their fees:

R-J Breathlessly Reports False Cosmo Firing Story

It's always a tricky for journalists to decide which of the many rumors we hear or see published ought to be believed or reported. Usually we tread on the side of caution, but the R-J threw that out the window today.

The R-J's Chris Sieroty this morning posted a piece online about gaming analyst Bill Lerner's claim in a research note that a top executive at newly opened Cosmopolitan had been forced out. Sieroty did the proper thing by calling the Cosmo folks for comment. But then, when they told him it wasn't true, he decided to . . . write a story about it anyway. And he used what he then should have known was a false report to globalize with this lead:

The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has been open for less than a month and already there's been talk on the Strip of Deutsche Bank AG being unhappy with executives at its $3.9 billion property.

Lerner claimed in the research note that gave rise to this article:

"We understand that Cosmopolitan has let go of its head of gaming operations believing that life-to-date the property had under-held notably."

That would be John Zaremba. He remains with the company in the same position. Spokeswoman Amy Rossetti says there's no reason to expect him to leave or lose his job.

Maybe Rossetti is spinning the stability of Zaremba's employment status. That doesn't matter. Lerner said the guy was gone. The guy isn't gone. In my world, that means Lerner's intel is flawed and not credible. In Sieroty's, evidently, it means you write the juicy story about troubles at the Strip's newest joint anyway. Even if Zaremba is canned next week, it doesn't matter; Lerner's note was factually wrong. Period.

But, anyhow, when did Lerner become such a credible source that his musings were news and refudiations of his remarks worthy of coverage? Was it when, a year ago, he advised investors that, based on the very scientific and fool-proof metric of eyeballing the scene at newly open CityCenter, that that New Year's "may have been the strongest in MGM Mirage history?" (It sure wasn't.) When he titled a research note in January 2010: "2010 Off To Good Start in Vegas, MGM Most Leveraged to Recovery?" (It also sure wasn't and Wynn and Sands were the biggest beneficiaries of whatever recovery happened last year.) Lerner's pro-MGM bent overwhelms all his analysis, and Sieroty should have at least noted that in giving context for Lerner or, better yet, not re-reported a disproved piece of gossip at all.

We can't know from the outside how Cosmo is doing yet for a couple of reasons. First, it's a privately held resort, so there's no obligation to publicly tell us. Second, its brief life has spanned at least two anomalous events -- New Year's Eve and CES -- that don't speak to how it'll be doing in critical, less intense periods after the newness factor has worn off a bit.

I understand Sieroty's itch to have something to say, but he'd be better served to pay attention to someone like Robert LaFleur of Hudson Securities, who traffics in data, not idle speculation and gossip. LaFleur, you may recall, tracks resort room rack rates weekly to see where resorts are raising and lowering the prices, an indicator of how they feel about their bookings.

His latest dispatch, from Jan. 4, 2011, indicated: "So far, Cosmo is adopting a very aggressive pricing stance relative to the market. We will see if it is sustainable."

Here's a graphic, showing average rates for February as they were between November and now. Click on it to see it closer:


That's real analysis. As is this, showing Cosmo pricing is above even Bellagio by a significant margin.


Now, that may change. It could plummet. In fact, I think it's sort of likely that it will; it's hard to conceive that Cosmo will charge more than Bellagio in the long run. But none of the actual data available suggests Deutsche Bank is so unhappy with the property performance that they're trying to sack top executives.

Again, Lerner may someday be proved correct. But to paraphrase Sen. Daniel Patrick Monyihan, while he's entitled to his own predictions, he's not entitled to his own facts.

Cosmo v Aria, A Fortnight Later

We in the media have wondered how we might know if The Cosmopolitan is doing well. It's a private company and they're not obligated to tell us, and I'm quite confident John Unwin's never going to bemoan conditions to wretches like me or Howard Stutz.

Happily, I recently discovered my favorite gaming industry analyst, Robert LaFleur of Hudson Securities, is back in action tracking room rates and providing reports to journalists. Rates are pretty much the only external data available, but it's painstaking to keep up with it because of the fluctuations. He does it so we don't have to, and his latest weekly report, out today, paints a fascinating early picture of Cosmo and what it's done to Aria and even Bellagio in its Shiny New Thing phase.

That graphic above (click on it to enlarge) shows that Cosmo has been raising its room rates dramatically for every single normal date LaFleur has checked. He looks every Monday for rates on Wednesdays and Saturdays over the coming two months or so. According to LaFleur, weekday asking prices are up 41 percent from when he started tracking them in November.

Meanwhile, next doors...


Cosmo's rack rates are 88 percent higher than Aria and 118 percent higher than Vdara on on weekends in January. And, in other parts of the report, we learn that Aria has dropped rates for six of the dates checked through the end of February. Most notably, they lowered their Saturday night rate for MLK Weekend by $30 to $209, which is interesting because the another LaFleur chart shows that Bellagio is up $50 on the same night to $279.

Cosmo's rates need to be taken cautiously because it is a new place and there's buzz. That second graph, in fact, shows that the rate differences between Cosmo and Bellagio/Aria/Vdara coming back into orbit by February.

But I'm intrigued by this: Aria continues to be lowering room rates on the same holiday weekends that its big sister, Bellagio, is raising them, is not good news for the MGM Resorts bunch.

If only they hadn't opened CityCenter in phases...

P.S. It's worth noting that the weekend the Vdara folks tried to extort $50 out of my CityCenter-loving sister-in-law, the rates had been reduced twice in two weeks leading up to that date. So demand was empirically soft, but she couldn't even have a 1 p.m. checkout?!?

99 Hours And Counting For Laak

[You can support Phil by texting SUNSHINE to 20222
to give $10 to Camp Sunshine]

Phil "The Unabomber" Laak has now been playing poker for 99 hours straight and counting at a $20/$10 No-Limit Hold 'Em at the Bellagio. On Saturday, he busted every known endurance record, the 72-hour stretch that is the official Guinness record and the 79-hour run that the poker world accepted as the real mark.

Since I've been following this wacky feat for AOL News for a few days now -- my piece on his surpassing the record and his allegiance to talcum powder is up this morning -- but here are some other fun images to share.

First of all, the Bellagio poker room is a nonstop madhouse. It looks like this every night I've been there:

Hang out at the Bellagio poker room long enough and you realize that it can be a full-service high-end take-out dining experience, carts coming and going nonstop. This wasn't Phil's, but I thought the flower was a nice touch:

Here's Phil with girlfriend Jennifer Tilly on Saturday night when he passed the mark of 79 hours set by Paul Zimbler of London who, incidentally, I interviewed via email for my AOL News piece:


For a while, Antonio Esfandiari, Laak's close pal and as WSOP bracelet winner known as The Magician, played at the table:


After he left, he made prop bets with other poker players that Laak would make it 96.5 hours, which he did. On Twitter, he was gleeful:


I, too, might be kept awake by the poof of hair sitting to the right of Phil.


That interviewer, incidentally, asked to sample the food that Phil was eating. Phil is having meals delivered by a nutritionist every five hours. The one at the 75th hour looked like this:


Phil is presently up $12,000. He keeps a graph every hour of whether he's up or down. He's been down more than $30,000 but came back. He promises to split the winnings with Camp Sunshine, a camp in Maine for kids with serious illnesses and their families. Looking back on it, he should have gotten pledges from other poker pros to donate X amount per hour after he broke the record. No word as to whether Antonio will be giving his prop-bet winnings to Camp Sunshine.

In case you're wondering, this is what's on the table besides him, and if you click to blow up that image you may be able to see me in the frame of the webcam while I was taking this shot:


Yes, he can see the webcam feed that has been going out for all this time, although he hasn't participated in the chat so far as I can tell. That would be this guy:


Phil vows he's used no caffeine yet but has enjoyed dollops of some sludge known as dextro-cyclodized liquid beef amino and protein complex recommended by a nutritionist for energy. That's what the bottle is behind the tissues.

This event/stunt has clearly been good for Laak, if he ever gets his sleep back. There are presently nearly 1900 people watching the live webcam stream and his Twitter following zoomed from about 1,500 on Wednesday to nearly 5,000 now.

Here's what the cam screen looked like an hour ago:


And finally, Laak's folks emailed me this fun little keepsake, a shot of me interviewing Laak and Tilly on Wednesday, the audio of which is available in the podcast feed or here.


That was in Hour 7. I interviewed him again at Hour 75 but opted not to podcast that because he understandably didn't make a whole lot of sense. I can only imagine how well he's speaking now as approaches 100.

Pictorial: Taxi Tunnels!

Back in December 2008 when Steve Wynn walked me through the soon-to-open Encore Las Vegas, he made an off-handed remark about how the taxi staging areas at his resorts are decorated to entertain cabbies. It was a little thing and, while I made a mental note to follow up, I never did.

One listener who was fascinated by that notion was Diane Taylor, a writer and weekly contributor to the blog at Living-Las-Vegas.Com. Taylor was the one who won the KNPR auction in February and donated $370 for lunch with me and Miles. Wynn Las Vegas donated the lunch to KNPR, so today Miles and I honored her donation with a terrific visit at Society Encore with her and her husband.

Diane had made one extra request. She wanted to know if the Wynn would show us the taxi tunnels. And so I asked the PR folks and, sure enough, they were happy to oblige.

First, we went down into the Encore tunnel. That's where that sign above leads to. It's a two-lane, 15-car length area with reddish orange walls adorned with flat-screen TVs tuned to ESPN.


Along the walls, too, were these murals. All of them involved drawings of sexy ladies and some sort of subterranean (as opposed to subliminal, natch) message about something related to the resort. For instance, this one...


...features the blonde there saying to nobody in particular: "Botero restaurant features two of famed Columbian artist Fernando Botero's sculptures and three of his paintings."

This one's fun, too:


It's a run-of-the-mill pajama party, see, and the redhead who happened to show up in a French maid outfit and seems to have a duster protruding from her mouth, says, "The high rollers can be found in the private Sky Casino, which is located at the top floor of Encore." Naturally, then, the only reasonable reply from the blonde trying to make the blood rush to her head is, "Did you know that our largest suite is 5,800 square feet and includes three bedrooms, an elevator and butler service?"

I did, actually.

This one took two frames to shoot:


This time, it's a lineup of cocktail waitresses. The bubble on the right says, "It's interesting to know that Mrs. Wynn directs the designs of all staff attire" and the lady to her left asked, "Did you know Mr. Wynn began his career in 1967 as part-owner, slot manager and assistant credit manager of the Frontier hotel?" That's fun, but wouldn't it have been even better if she had said, "Did you know that Mr. Wynn once called the Frontier Hotel the single biggest toilet in Las Vegas?"

Meanwhile, at the pool...


...one woman says, "Inspired by the French Riviera, the pools at Encore are at the heart of the activity" while the ladies to the far right are marveling, "The restaurant Wazuzu features a crystal dragon made of 90,000 crystals and 2,400 flickering lights."

There's also a restroom down there as well as signs indicating that the hotel holds a weekly NFL contest where taxi drivers who pick winning teams win stuff.

Obviously, the point here is to give cabbies something fun to look at and perhaps fill their heads with some good selling points while they wait to pick up passengers. Wynn started the taxi tunnel idea with Bellagio because he didn't like the way that the line of taxis looked at Mirage and Treasure Island.

LVCabChronicles, a Vegas taxi driver who blogs and Tweets about the trade, says that Paris, Riviera and Aria also have tunnels. He says cabbies are generally pleased with the Wynn folks and that "there is no question Mr. Wynn cares about the cabbies," but he also noted when I asked about the downsides:

"They are tunnels. You can get trapped in there, for sure. If business is slow and you commit to that tunnel, you can be in there a while. If a regular calls, I can't get them, I'm stuck. If my shift is over, I'm stuck. Plus, Wynn's driveway in general is way too small for the amount traffic coming and going, which lead to many cabbies hating that place at first. ... Worth noting: multiple companies forbid drivers from pick up at these properties when it rains. It gets very very slick in those tunnels."

Noted. And speaking of the Wynn tunnel, here we go.


The Wynn Las Vegas tunnel is lined with images of race cars. It's not quite the buxom babes spouting sweet somethings about the resort, but whatever. Here are some more shots:


I can sure see how that could get claustrophobic. There is, too, a unisex bathroom down here. LVCabChronicles said the vast majority of taxi stands at Vegas resorts don't have restrooms easily accessible to drivers. None of the other taxi waiting areas, he wrote, are decorated at all.

He also had praise for Bellagio, which "has a nice setup with a picnic table and vending machines and the restroom for drivers. They also have a dry-erase board that indicates the exact number of check ins/outs at that hotel that week which can be useful for drivers."

Hey! That could be useful to nosy journalists, too! Just saying!

Anyhow, that was a fun look-see at something most people don't ever think about or get to view. The Wynn fellow who drove us took us through the underground valet area of the hotel and we passed this:


That's the maintenance and storage area for the Ferraris that are sold at the resort.

Finally, since everyone's so curious, here's a shot of the new Switch Beach Club and Surrender Nightclub being built where Encore's west valet used to be. I was intrigued by the bridge built from Wynn self-park's second level because I wonder if that's going to be a faster way just to get to Encore from that garage without having to walk all the way around the resort.


But mostly, I wondered: What happened to the taxi tunnel for that valet stand?