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

A 7-Point Analysis Of Sahara's Closure

[UPDATE: Find other excellent analysis from David McKee at Stiffs & Georges. Point me the way if there's more elsewhere worth noting.]

OK. I raced to get my own version of the Sahara closure story up, and it was interesting because it seemed I was the one telling pretty much everyone I interviewed that it was happening. That included economist Stephen Brown from UNLV, Sandy Hackett whose dad's management of the show room drew in so many bold-faced names and Stacey Loizeaux, owner of the demolition company that gets the call whenever there's a piece of Vegas history to destroy.

You can read my account -- and their thoughts -- at AOL News. [Aside: I just received an email from my editor saying that despite the massive layoffs this week as a result of the AOL merger with Huffington Post, my gig is the same as always for at least a while. Whew and yay, because the new HuffPo traffic will make AOL News stories easily among the Web's most-viewed reporting.]

Anyhow, some little ideas and thoughts that have occurred to me, some of which I have Tweeted:

* Was Sharron Angle right? Remember when Sen. Harry Reid's GOP opponent suggested Reid's saving CityCenter and not, say, the Fontainebleau, was a case of government picking economic winners and losers? And when she said that the 12,000 jobs "saved" at CityCenter would end up coming from elsewhere? Is this the proof of that? If Reid had shaken down the Lending Tree and Fontainebleau had opened, would Nazarian have chosen to double down on Sahara rather than fold? Instead, a part of the Strip that looked just a couple years ago to be the Next Big Thing is an atrophied disaster area that some are suggesting shouldn't even be considered part of the Strip anymore. UNLV's Brown, in remarks I did not include in my piece, said it's not so simple, that CityCenter helps Vegas compete with posh international gaming destinations and distinguishes the city differently than, say, a Sahara overhaul might. Fair enough, but it's worth considering that the F'Blew effect is clearly a big factor in the Sahara's demise as well as the Riv's bankruptcy and other long-term construction paralysis in that area.

* What now, Monofail? Seriously, what the hell happens now? Do they just shut down that stop? I've parked at the Sahara and ridden the rail to the Las Vegas Convention Center, and now I can't even park there to do that? What's the point?

* We heart Sahara. Riviera? Meh. The outpouring of emotion on Twitter today over the Sahara's fate is fascinating because it's so Stardust-esque. There's a genuine affection for the Sahara, but I suspect there won't be if/when the Riviera finally bites it. Not all Old Vegas properties are created equal, as we saw with the mourning over Stardust and the good-riddance shrugs over the Frontier.

* Woo-hoo, Interwebs! This story was broken by Chuck at VegasTripping.Com last night, a full 14 hours before the MSM picked up on it with Sam Nazarian's statement. I just love when this happens. I love it more when I'm the one who does it, but nonetheless, it warms my heart.

* Hooray For Unions. Organized labor has had a very rough year so far, and it's terrible that more than 1,000 employees will lose their jobs. But the only reason why they get to stay until May instead of being out on their asses tomorrow is that the unions got lawmakers to dictate a 60-day notice. So all you non-union folks at the parts of the Sahara that aren't union, be grateful for that, k?

* Will SLS Way disappear? Remember this bit of official branding:


So, what now? SLS stands for "Something Lovely's Starting" which is vomit-in-mouth-inducing to begin with. But will it just be wiped from the map?

* Commemorative chips anyone? I chatted with Sheldon Smith of the Casino Chip and Gaming Token Collectors Club for that AOL News piece as well, and he said that folks should expect a small bump in value of mint-condition Sahara chips after the closure. They're hoping they'll issue commemorative closing chips, too, which could be a lot of free money for the casino. I'm doubting it, though; unlike Boyd, which did it for the Stardust, Nazarian and his crew aren't really in the casino business. (The casino was managed for them.) That said, could be time to get over there and grab some keepsakes. Or maybe they'll have an auction! Yay!

That's all I got for the moment. More will come, no doubt.

Twitter Twerps Respond With More B.S. And Number-Gaming

I'm not going to pretend I understand everything Chris Rauschnot wrote in his belated, blathering reaction to the firestorm set off by my Las Vegas Weekly column and Chuckmonster's VegasTripping expose examining the nefarious and greedy tactics of the Twitter brothers who scammed Vegas.

I do know what's NOT in here:

* Any explanation or apology for their ham-handed and bullying practices of demanding freebies and threatening casinos and others when they're not sated.

* Any explanation as to how it is that their numbers have so stunningly plateaued in the past year if they didn't build them fraudulently rather than organically. Is there any reason why popular Tweeters with 40,000 or 50,000 robust and engaged followers would suddenly just stop gaining more people? This stuff feeds upon itself; the more people who see your stuff, the more they pass it along, the more new followers you get. It doesn't stop, it grows exponentially as you gather steam. How does it make any sense that Tweeters as popular as they claim to be and as prolific as they are would not continue to grow -- especially after that puff piece I mistakenly provided them six months ago.

* Any accounting, in the blah-blah about impressions and numbers, for the notion that just because you say something on Twitter doesn't mean anyone notices it. That is, I have about 3,450 followers right now. If I Tweet something, I don't get to pretend that all 3,450 -- if they're all real people anyway -- read it. This is where data from Twitter is dicey, because it's a whitewater river flowing by. Engagement is far more important than "impressions," especially since it seems clear that the vast number of followers of @24k and @VegasBill are not real people anyway. There are a lot of Twitter engagement assessment tools out there that folks like The Twerps take as gospel but which have never been independently evaluated by statisticians or other credible figures. But they fail the common-sense test, just as Chris' claim that he was only fishing for birthday Tweets for his dear brother is an idiotic suggestion that no thinking person would accept.

As I -- and Chuck! -- have said, my greatest talents don't lie in the technological realm. I am, however, an expert on the English language and just want to note that this passage...

To say that Tweets from 24k or VegasBiLL spur little to no action, do not know the analytics behind what they can do, especially when dealing with positive or highly relevant information to the followers and network. According to TweetReach, a service that analyzes reach and impressions on Twitter, is as Brian Solis says, ". an essential part of any digital influence program.

...is the mark of an illiterate man.

Chris goes on about YouTube and how a couple of his videos enjoyed very large viewerships. Terrific. No way of knowing if maybe some major celebrity site picked it up, which would be a lark and not a trend. What I do know is that he has 765 videos in his YouTube channel, Gershwin9, and a whopping 14 comments.


Chris can talk and talk and talk about the long tail and boast using non-credible metrics for engagement, but the fact is that he's got 50,000 or so followers and only ... FOUR of them have gone to watch this video posted three days ago?!?


Come on, dude. Give it up. You're a phony. Case closed.

P.S. It is endlessly funny that Cody has altered his Twitter name from VegasBill to VegasBiLL and that he and Rauschnot have started using that in casual writing as well as on Twitter. They did that, of course, to differentiate from @VegasBilll, the hilarious parody account that in just nine tweets cut to the quick of what's wrong with these poseurs. I also love that, following on @EricWhitaker's suggestion, the parody account is now @VegasBilLL.

Twitter Twerps Drama: The VegasTripping Whine

I know I should let this go. I know it. And maybe I'll wise up and not post this once I write it. But I can't help it.

Chuck from VegasTripping is a terrific guy, a wonderfully talented writer and an important figure on the Vegas web world. But this week he also showed himself to be quite petulant and blinded by frustration.

You see, Chuck rightfully notes that he began picking on Twitter Twerps Bill Cody and Chris Rauschnot ages ago. Now that it required my Las Vegas Weekly column to really take the big tug on the string that is unraveling the Twitter Twerps' outrageous scam, Chuck is so pissed off that he can't help but to lash out at me and accuse me of all sorts of inane, ridiculous and nefarious motives. And, in the process, he's dredged up conspiracy theories about the press that I thought were beneath his sophistication.

First, here's an excerpt about me that Chuck wrote in his commentary this week on the Twerps:

And finally, there is the 'slightly less direct than before' approach:

24k: It's @VegasBill's birthday next week. Any #Vegas hotels/venues want to help us celebrate?

Upon seeing the above tweet, local journalist Steve Friess, who played a huge part in legitimizing the Twitter Twins via a supremely nauseating puff piece profile penned for the Las Vegas Weekly last year - suddenly joined the chorus of naysayers and started taking @24k and @VegasBill to task for their antics. So moved was Friess, that he unleashed his Kracken all over @24k's ballsy birthday request right onto THEfacebook where embers of discussion steamed, followed by selective deletions by Rauschnot. This proved to be the last straw for previously supportive Friess, who fired a cannonball across the bow of the S.S.#hashtag wrapped in a mea culpa for his endorsement of The Twitter Twins (née Twerps.)

But before we let Mr. Friess swim away from the T(w)itanic unscathed, pointing fingers at outlines slowly sinking on the poop deck, he needs to bear the weight of his baggage. Steve's talents lie in areas beyond technology, he fastidiously panned Twitter as waste of time until he saw how it affected change during the Iranian protests of June 2009, roughly at about the same time VT called bullshit on the Twitter Twins and their Tweets for Eats scam. I felt then and I still do now that his initial Las Vegas Weekly puff piece was the journalistic equivalent of a comped dinner, show tickets or event access. He opted to not do his homework on their profile piece and instead give them shred of legitimate press credibility which the Twitter Twins pedaled as a USDA stamp of approval. This resulted in a Las Vegas Weekly getting decent amount of traffic to the article (a metric a publisher uses to decides if the author is worth keeping on staff) as well Tweet pimping the authors Twitter handle and his blog. Did Steve pull this punch on purpose? Only he knows.

OK. So. I've no problem whatsoever taking guff for my mistakes, and publicly at that. What drives folks like Chuck nuts, though, is that I -- unlike almost any media figure in Vegas -- often take myself to task before others get to go at it. It defuses the power of their attacks and leaves them sputtering -- see above excerpt -- but that's not why I do it. I do it because I expect the same accountability from myself that I demand from other media folks. If I cannot openly state when I've failed, how can I ever hope that Sherm Frederick, Steve Sebelius, Jon Ralston or any number of other self-righteous and thin-skinned buffoons will do the same? (They never do, of course, but oh well.)

It so happens that Chuck was on the Vegas Gang podcast earlier this month telegraphing to the world that he had an expose planned for the Twitter Twerps. I don't deny this played a role in the timing of my column after I heard the show last week. I had been thinking quite a lot about this problem, that I had laid a rancid doody out there a few months ago and I needed to clean up after myself sooner or later. But I hadn't really been paying attention to Cody or Rauschnot since August because I was a little busy covering a major national election and a resort opening.

I don't keep as careful tabs on what everyone is saying on the Vegas Twitterverse as I should. I acknowledge that, but there's just so much going on there and elsewhere and it's easy to overlook things that flow by. So it was fortunate when I did spot early in January a @VegasBill tweet that crassly bullied @StationCasinos over unfollowing them, and my sniffer went up again. That, by the by, was long before I had any idea that Chuck was building his case against the Twerps. It just raised a flag to me.

Then, last week, Chris tweeted his solicitation for birthday goodies for Bill and, combined with hearing later that day about Chuck's forthcoming treatise, it seemed I needed to own up to my mistake sooner than later.

What was my mistake? In short, the original column was a lazy job. Period. I've often argued that the most likely reason for media incompetence is not ideology, greed or malice but laziness. And in this case, I'm guilty. Sometimes we journalists fall in love with a narrative, and as a columnist I get to pick and choose my narratives whimsically. The Twerps' back story was fascinating to me, I liked the idea of New Media figures popping up out of nowhere and gaining credibility and I was aware neither that Twitter numbers can, literally, be bought, nor that there were gauges for Twitter engagement that could disprove their claims of influence.

So I was uninformed and working too fast and went at it from a less skeptical perspective than I should have. And I heard about it from folks who were baffled by my atypical lack of cynicism, but I was obstinate and decided they were just jealous of the Twerps' success.

I doubled down on a bad bet for a while. Then the Station unfollow tweet reasserted the matter in my mind, and Chris lying to me that he wasn't fishing for comps with the birthday tweet really, personally offended me. Did this asshole truly believe I'm that stupid? Yikes. I'd been had. Chuck calls all this "sudden." That's kind of how I roll; I speak up as quickly as I can. I don't hang out for months nursing my grievance and then cry about it when someone cuts me in line.

That's how we came to this week, when the whole thing erupted in spectacular fashion after my column posted.

Chuck's response genuinely confuses me because he, of all people, has commented repeatedly and admiringly over the years about my willingness to take on powerful, influential people and companies. Quite a lot of the stupidity that has fallen from the mouths of Vegas moguls and celebrities that becomes fodder for Chuck's blog emerges from my reporting. In fact, interestingly, Chuck's own commenters seemed willing to give me the benefit of the doubt that Chuck denied me even as they regaled him for the rest of his excellent post.

I thought I'd earned a little more credibility with him than to have it suggested that I wrote the initial column to, uh, spike web traffic and hang onto my column gig. Seriously, that's what he's alleging. Read this part again:

This resulted in a Las Vegas Weekly [sic] getting decent amount of traffic to the article (a metric a publisher uses to decides if the author is worth keeping on staff) as well Tweet pimping the authors Twitter handle and his blog.

It is true, the initial column could have been better researched, better considered. I've admitted that. But to run directly for the Palinesque conclusion that I sold out for some nebulous notion of getting Twitter followers or blog readers or media attention of whatever sort shows that as much as Chuck has developed as a writer and, yes, a journalist, he remains quite a bit out of touch with how actual media operates. Also, it ignores the fact that all it takes for @24k or @VegasBill to pimp your Twitter handle is to re-tweet something they say. Duh.

This part is shockingly ignorant: My August column on Bill and Chris was a gambit to persuade my editor to keep me on? When the hell was I at risk of losing my gig? Doesn't he know that happy puff pieces don't accomplish that anyway, that controversy and drama are what the public finds compelling and gets people talking/reading/commenting? Does he know that in all the years I've been a journalist, no editor has ever even told me what my web traffic was on any single article? I don't have a clue. Fuck, I hardly ever even look at my own blog stats or download data for the podcasts! If I had to guess, the Weekly likes my column because it (usually) gives the publication some gravitas, not because it drives traffic. Weeks like this are just a bonus!

No, Chuck is peeved because he wanted to be the dragon slayer here -- and still fancies he is -- but I snuck in before his long-planned assault could be launched. Didn't anyone wonder how it was possible he could have such a well-considered rant, complete with screen shots and excerpts, up so quickly? He got scooped on his own story which, incidentally, I have been as well on the Vegas Gang, the Stiffs & Georges blog and elsewhere. It's no fun. But if I'm dumb enough to tell the world and/or competitors what big thing I've got coming up, then I guess I'll have to accept the only logical outcome for my stupidity. Them's the breaks.

Here's another thing, big guy. You don't get credit for feeling something. We've seen each other a few times since August and God knows how many blog posts you've written, although not a one about the lameness of my Aug. 18 column. You could've asked me privately -- and I would've told you of my regret if I was up to that point in my process -- or blasted me in public. You didn't. Tough.

Oh, and how do you know what sort of traffic the Las Vegas Weekly got? You chastise me for not doing my digital homework, but did you even look? I'm pretty sure that Aug. 18 piece never cracked the Top 10 for the site and to date has garnered just 5 "recommends" on Facebook and one or two comments. Yet here you state this as fact, as part of the premise for your simplistic media conspiracy argument, and you've got no proof.

Fact is, it required someone who dwells comfortably in both the online and mainstream media worlds to expose the Twerps in full. Chuck may not know this, but I've been called or emailed by publicists for years asking who is real and who isn't in the confusing Web world. That -- and Chuck seems to acknowledge this -- is why my initial column was so harmful, because I put my own considerable credibility behind the Twerps. It's also why this round is so damaging, because I'm pulling the plug and watching these cretins flail as the drain sucks them in.

I admire Chuck immensely. I think it's silly that he modestly suggests he's not much of a journalist or writer. He's outstanding at both, usually. That's why this whine is beneath him. He knows me better than this and he ought to know how journalism works better than this, too. Perhaps he went on this rant specifically knowing I'd react and drive traffic to or awareness of his site? I don't believe that, but it's the logical extension of Chuck's accusations towards me.

Hmmm. So should I post this? Let's see...Oops!