In Vegas, Woe Is Thee Who Relies On Google Maps

Take a good look at the images in this post. Click on them to enlarge and look closer. You'll be utterly amazed. I am.

I know others have taken note of strange glitches of Google Maps -- I believe Excalibur used to show up in the middle of the Wynn Golf Course -- but this is just insane. On the map above, Aria is north of Cosmo, the Crystals is south of Veer and there's a make-believe road called Business Lane.

At least those places are in the right vague vicinity on that one. Treasure Island...

...is north of Circus Circus! How unfortunate for them!

I feel for anyone who went out to this lonely spot to buy Lion King tickets...

...or thought they'd find the Las Vegas Strip east of Hooters...

...or looked for the Palazzo south of The Venetian...

...or tried to decide why there are two Wynn Las Vegases so they could get to their table at Alex:

Anyone else stumped as to where they got the name "Emerald Green Golf Course" for Bali Hai...

...or when anyone has ever referred to Interstate 15 as...

...as either the Mojave Freeway or the Barstow Freeway?

As for Vdara, which is what I was looking up in the first place, it's particularly alarming that their own paid Google ad provides this map...

...putting the hotel, umm, east of Eastern Avenue. Also, Google thinks...

...Aria is there, too. Hmmm. That could explain a lot about the hotel's occupancy, doesn't it?

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:

Pictorial: The Vdara Kwik-E-Mart Is Now Open!

After 15 months of operation, Vdara at CityCenter has finally added something that surely must have been mentioned back in class when MGM Resorts CEO Jim Murren was earning his much-vaunted urban planning degree: A sundries shop.

Yes, Murren expected people to live in the hotel-condo Vdara in a so-called "urban" manner without a nearby grocery or even a way to get a stick of gum, making it more likely than not the only 1,500+ unit hotel in the world not to offer even a vending machine from which to purchase basic necessities. This oversight was quite obvious to yours truly and many others, but somehow it made sense to MGM brass to do without.

Or maybe not! It may not have even been an oversight! I'll get back to that in a moment!

Anyhow, today was the first day of operations for the Market Cafe Vdara, which was breathlessly described in a press release today as -- and I'm not making this up -- "a unique experience unlike anything in Las Vegas." This is MGM, as addicted to overpromising as Charlie Sheen is to his own addled voice.

What it is, however, is a reasonably nice and pretty store with just about all that you'd need to fix a meal in your kitchen-equipped Vdara room:


They went with brands like Dean & Deluca and stuff of that caliber, and it's a pretty nice selection. There's also fresh fruit and veggies and I think meats there as well.

Also, there's a counter and some seating where you can eat in, too. They brought over chef Martin Heierling, who presides at Sensi at Bellagio as well as the soon-closing Silk Road a few feet from the Market Cafe Vdara. In fact, he was hanging out there when I went over today.


He told me some interesting stuff, and I'll get back to that in a sec. First, here's some of the wares and prices:


I had a $9.50 Southwest chicken sandwich heated up on the roll that's second from the left above. It was, in fact, quite delicious. But to give an idea of the markups, the Pom Light Wildberry drink I bought from the chiller cost $3.30. I didn't look at what those aspirin cost, but I'm sure it'd give me a headache.

So Heierling is obviously a little morose about Silk Road's closure this Sunday, but he said that MGM brass are looking for another space for him somewhere to open a new restaurant. He also told me Silk Road won't be replaced with another restaurant but instead will be used -- as he says it has been in the past several months since they stopped serving dinner -- for banquets associated with conventions at CityCenter. Okey dokey.

The most interesting reveal from Heierling was that the space for Market Cafe Vdara was actually always there. That is, they always planned to have a sundries shop there but MGM ran out of money as they were completing CityCenter and postponed it. There was always a hollow room in this space, he said. Which makes me wonder: What other essential features did CityCenter put off? Is there maybe a whole other casino at Aria that actually does have natural light? Maybe there really are more pocket parks somewhere?

Meanwhile, as I ate I watched several managers plotting out where to put more merchandise and such, and that's great. But there was one pretty critical oversight: No news rack. People -- and especially Jim Murren's kind of people -- do that, they seek out a Newsweek or a Review-Journal when they head down to the shop in the morning for their coffee or their Dean and Deluca Moroccan spice rub.

But there's also one other odd thing:


The place closes at 8 p.m. After that, you must order proper food from room service. Doesn't that seem a little early to you? Couldn't they somehow design it to keep the sundries shop open later or all night? Haven't they defeated the purpose if I come in from Haze Marquee with a rip-roaring headache and I need some overpriced Excedrin? Isn't it at the most desperate hours that people will pay the most?

Heierling said it's a work in progress and they may adjust the hours. OK, then. I'm just proud of them for caving into logic and opening anything.

It did dawn on me that this could be what Murren meant when he told that hack from the L.A. Times a few months ago that CityCenter is still opening in phases, a total reversal of his lengthy dissertations of 2009 about CityCenter's superior to Wynn and others in opening all at once.

In fact, this could be a momentous occasion. Either this is an indication that Murren still has some magical surprises left in store or the debut of the Vdara Kwik-E-Mart means that today, March 1, 2011, marks the official completion of CityCenter!

Woo-hoo either way.

Aria Wrap Coming Apart At The Seams?

How long has this thing been up? A week? LOOK AT IT!


These were shot by Amy from Panorama Towers tonight. She didn't notice it this morning, so she thinks it might be intentional or that they're working on fixing something. But I just can't figure out how that could be; if they were peeling some of it off, would they send a crew out there to just pull at corners and leave them hanging?


What's interesting is that when I was at the Panorama condo on Monday, there was a chunk of the H that was missing. That's been fixed. So my hunch is that they've had trouble applying this wrap because the building surface isn't smooth. Part of the reason they got LEED Gold Certification for Aria was that the windows are designed with a small overhang above it that reduced the amount of sunlight gets into the rooms and, thus, reduced the A/C usage.

Here's another theory: Aria is uncomfortable with this desecration and humiliation as our dogs are when Miles tries to put a sweaters on them. The soul of the building is protesting, Mr. Murren. Set it free!

By the way, it occurs to me that MGM Resorts would've been wiser to wrap Vdara instead. It's not as prestigious a property, it actually faces south so as to face to California-to-Vegas-bound cars and -- added bonus! -- it could mitigate the sun glare from the Death Ray. And now there's another reason: The wrap would probably stick better.

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?!?

It's BASH MGM DAY!

Amid the revisionist history propagated by its brass and the disrespect the company is showing for its own architecture, MGM Resorts is having a rough day around these parts. But bad things come in threes, as they say, and another blunder today shows that, one year on, CityCenter's customer service leaves a lot to be desired.

Y'all might remember my sister-in-law and brother-in-law. I wrote a Las Vegas Weekly column about how much they loved CityCenter for all the reasons CEO Jim Murren said some people would. They were back this weekend and, of course, they returned to Vdara. They were there for four nights.

Their flight leaves today at 4 p.m., so sis-in-law hoped to stay in the room until 2 p.m. You know, a late checkout. She called down. She learned no can do, if she wanted to stay past noon, she would have to pay another $50. Not even a "Well, we can give you until 1." You know, like pretty much every hotel I've ever stayed at would do. Also, as Bellagio would usually do.

Did I mention that Vdara was so empty all weekend it could have easily been mistaken for Neonopolis? This weekend, with the marathon and the National Finals Rodeo and whatever else was happening, we never saw a single other soul in the hall or on the elevator. So the demand is soft. It's no skin off their teeth to give it another hour.

But a return customer who had stayed for four days can't get another hour or two in her room? The company is so hard up, they want to extort her?

Tacky tacky.

More on the Vdara Death Ray

I am a very lucky reporter. I know this, that I have a knack for accidentally being in the right places at the right times. And so it was yesterday when I headed over to the Vdara pool to check out the vaunted "death ray" for myself for an AOL News follow-up to the Saturday Review-Journal cover story that has set the Web afire.

As good fortune would have it, I was there right when no less than Bobby Baldwin, CityCenter's CEO and president, was also walking the area with a group of suits and pantsuits examining what it is that Joan Whitely exposed in her R-J piece.

That is, in short, that the position of the glass, concave Vdara tower is producing unbearably hot reflections of the sun onto areas of the pool deck. The hotspot moves from place to place as the Earth rotates, melting things and singeing hair. It's nicknamed the "death ray" and is certain to be a question on "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" this weekend or my name is Ralph.

So, anyhow, here's Baldwin, in the white shirt and red tie, leading his team as they inspect the ground in various places and then look up, unmistakably, at the side of the building.


Many people think, thanks to the R-J graphic that has been heavily replicated across the Web, that the "death ray" is something you see, that there's a glowing sphere that you can wisely avoid.

It's not so simple. It does move from place to place even during the hour I was there and you don't really know you're in it until you walk through it. Then it is very noticeably hotter. The ground, which I could walk on without sandals, became scorching, and I nearly burned my fingers touching the metal lounge chairs. I am not sure how this fellow here is bearing it, but he's going to have a rude awakening, to be sure. Hard to imagine what it must be like out there when it's 115 degrees out or how it took until late September for visitors to alert the media.

I'm pleased with my AOL piece, which did add something new to the conversation inasmuch as I've obtained letters and emails from 2008 showing that a vendor warned CityCenter officials that their solution to the known problem would be inadequate. Some of that may be the sour grapes of a vendor who didn't get a contract, but that company is the leader and innovator in the field and their warnings, as it happens, turned out to be right.

Also, I got to quote from "Five Hundy By Midnight," although my editors removed the line by Tim Dressen about your organs cooking. They also removed my reference to a hilarious Tweet from @misadventurer noting that it was ironic that the resort that starts with the letters VD would produce a "burning sensation." Oh, well!

Meanwhile, I really loved this particular shot of Vdara. With the inexplicable black background, it certainly does read "death ray."


Run!!!

Beware the R-J Death Ray, Too!

The Internet is abuzz over the Review-Journal's great Saturday story about the Vdara "death ray," the sunlight that reflects off the side of the glass hotel tower and unbearably heats up sections of the pool deck.

It's such a terrific story that it's been linked to by even those who have sworn off the R-J and vowed not to link to them because of the paper's campaign to curb copyright infringements by suing dozens of website owners. Here's one of those examples:


Now, while the R-J is not actually suing anyone who merely links to their work, I feel it might be smart to note that the paper's Righthaven campaign doesn't just cover the stolen written word. The R-J's graphic artist, Mike Johnson, created a great illustration that has been lifted wholesale by RawVegas.TV, Gizmodo.Com, HospitalityNet.Org and many others, see. It's vaguely possible they asked for permission, but the R-J has said that stuff that is used with permission should be labeled as, uh, "used with permission."

Gizmodo in particular is a huge site. They're the ones, recall, who "found" the iPhone4 in a bar earlier this year. And, as Review-Journal attorney Mark Hinueber noted at a Society of Professional Journalists event on Saturday, they operate in the Internet space and ought to know better.

So what's that I smell along with the singed hair at Vdara? Ahh, right. Here come another set of Righthaven lawsuits.

The LVW Col: Some Heart CityCenter

Here's this week's column, all the more poignant given that MGM Mirage yesterday acknowledged that Aria's occupancy was a measly 63 percent in its first quarter and that it has lodged itself firmly in the mid-market. Still, some people are enthralled and I happen to be related to two of them. Read on. -sf

The other CityCenter
Talking with a couple of out-of-towners who think
MGM Mirage’s latest gamble
is—wait for it—the best place in town

By STEVE FRIESS

In the run-up to the grand debut of CityCenter, MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren said a lot of stuff. As a journalist, I focused on the absurdity of so much of it, from the claim that there was something analogous to Central Park somewhere in the 67-acre, $8.5-billion complex to the suggestion that there is anything novel, nine years after the Palms opened, about the concept of a themeless Vegas resort.

One of the strangest claims was when Murren told me CityCenter would draw in a whole new class of clientele from all over the world who had yet to discover Las Vegas and all the high-end offerings it had in store.

Who, I wondered, were these creatures? Who could possibly be left out there unaware of Vegas? Who on any level of social strata hadn’t at least given it some thought as a potential vacation destination? Who would hear of CityCenter and finally be persuaded that they could have a good time on the once-tacky Strip?

And then, late last month, I found two such people. As it turned out, I didn’t have to look any farther than my own family. And I realized that, for fairness’ sake, I owed Murren and his gang this column.

Read the REST at LasVegasWeekly.Com

Vdara, The Opening Night

[Correction: That really is a Rauschenberg. It's on loan from Bellagio. I guess it wasn't part of the $40m acquisition, so it wasn't promoted. I stand corrected.]


I don't know how to gracefully swing from something as grave as dozens of colleagues becoming unemployed to this, but CityCenter's openings remain the most significant story in Las Vegas this year -- yes, it's bigger than the Ensign follies and more locally significant than anything Harry Reid may do in DC -- and I've got to continue to document it.

So...those lovelies above were models hired by CityCenter and party sponsor Vanity Fair to offer peeks of their cleavage at the soiree throughout the first floor of Vdara, which opened officially. I must admit that it was tickling to finally be able to turn right off the Strip onto Harmon Avenue and drive up under the Nancy Rubins boat sculpture. I just love that piece so much.

After that, though, HOLY CRAPOLINA, People! You WILL be confused about where to drive. I think I had to go around twice and find the right turn to get to Vdara valet. As I wrote in my post after my first tour, the place has a feel of a very modern-looking airport terminal in that respect. MAJOR troubles ahead in terms of confused motorists. And the entire place will snarl when there are serious accidents. Yikes.

I'm not as good at writing up design and interior descriptions as Chuck from VegasTripping.Com or Hunter from RateVegas.Com, but I got here first, so I'll give it my best shot.

Vdara's first floor -- haven't seen the rooms yet -- could easily be that of a Grand Hyatt or another upper-middle-end hotel. There's a bar, one restaurant, some sitting areas and some convention space tucked in one side. It's intended as a hotel-condo but, of course, there's no grocery store or small convenience store that I could see. Where do they think people who might live there would get their sundries? Baffling.

There is a definitive 1970s-ish vibe in the decor, which is headlined by this Frank Stella piece behind registration. I recall in the 1970s as a boy on Long Island, my dad's printing company office was adorned with reproductions of similar colorful-shape pieces like this:


I was happy to see some substantial carpeting on the lobby. It is my biggest worry about what I've seen of Aria so far, that they've got these huge wide-open spaces and lots of hard surfaces and nothing to absorb noise or make walking less punishing.

The restaurant, Silk Road, follows through with this using something I haven't seen anyone EVER use in Vegas: Wallpaper. And shiny, busy wallpaper at that. Here's the inside and out of it:


I actually liked the wallpaper and totally loved the big bottle installation over the bar. It reminded me of my mother's kitchen as a boy, where the wallpaper was so intense that I could sit there for hours working out shapes and stuff. Sad, but I found that fun.

Back in the lobby, Bar Vdara is very cool. It may be that I just finished cooking Thanksgiving dinner and using my food-processor slicer, but I think of uncooked potato chips when I see this fixture:


There were two things in the lobby that were totally out of place. This...


...reproduction of a 1999 Rauschenberg is one. It must be a repro or Team CityCenter Art would've made it well known that they had one. If you're going to use random pieces in and among the headliners like Rubins and Stella and you want visitors to realize that Stella is REAL, maybe go with UNKNOWN or up-and-coming artists for random spots like this?

The other thing was this:


It was some sort of video display of information about Sebastian Copeland, a photographer-adventurer. I couldn't tell if it was there just because Copeland was one of the headliners for the party or if it would be there permanently. Either way, it was ineffective. It was an ugly bunch of screens in the middle of a very lovely space and nobody paid any attention to it. [UPDATE: They're temporary, CityCenter PR peeps say. Good. They're dumb.]

Vdara's lobby has the single most interesting piece of artwork (to me) in the whole $40 million collection, twin wall installations by the elevator banks, one of which is this:



See that? Small slits of paper stacked up make that design. When I brought it up to Hunter Hillegas in the car last month on our way to dinner, he actually bounced up and down with glee over how cool it is. It's by Peter Wegner, a name you should know. Here's a terrific written Q-and-A from KQED, an NPR station.

Also cool was how this outdoor podium/sign becomes a couch at Silk Road...


...and the view of the Rubins from inside.


When you go left from the registration desk, you come to a path with this baubly light fixture...


...that leads to a space outside of the ballrooms of the convention area. Here's one of those rooms -- I didn't go inside, sorry -- named for Rafael Vinoly, the architect of Vdara.


In that ballroom lobby area was this pretty cool lighted installation:



It was a nice enough party. Silk Road served up these drinks...


...and by the convention area was this bar serving fancy champagne.


Waiters circulated with flutes of champagne or...glasses of water. I'd never actually seen that before, people walking around a reception with trays of water. Have you?

The food was minimal. Actually, it was hidden in the convention area in such a way that most people at the other end of the event had no idea it was there. There was a bar of little sweets:


Those tree branches sport chocolate-dipped strawberries. The middle photo were trays of marshmallowy things.

Finally, I saw something I hadn't realized was there as I was driving out. Uh, once I figured out how to get out, that is. Planet Hollywood has erected this gigantic...


...lighted screen. I don't recall that being there before, but it will greet everyone who exits CityCenter from the Strip and walks across the pedestrian bridge. I was driving when I shot this, so I apologize for its lack of clarity.

It reminds me of what Steve Wynn once told me when he built that mountain: "A carnival's great, but you can only control your section of the midway." I doubt Jim Murren will be sending Robert Earl any bouquets for that eyesore.