Fontainebleau Opening Date Rumor, Bellagio Sold Again, F1 Prices Tumbling & Durango Is Stunning!

Hello and welcome to the MT and Vegas podcast. I'm Sean Coomer, your host joined as always by Mark Ostriman. We have a great show for you. As a reminder, you can watch this entire show along with all the visuals that go with it at youtube.com forward slash miles to memories that's youtube.com forward slash miles to memories. We record two shows a week on Tuesdays and Fridays, release them on youtube and then combine them into this audio podcast once a week for your listening enjoyment. We hope you enjoy it. If you do like the show, consider leaving us a five star review and Apple podcast or your preferred podcast app. It helps us out tremendously. And as a final reminder, you can find all of our Vegas content that's posts, podcasts and videos at mtmvegas.com. Thanks again for listening. Let's hit it. So Mark, we have a deal alert longhorn casino. They're offering everyone who caches their paycheck a free spin of the wheel. You can win up to $1,000 in free slot play. Caching your paycheck in casinos has been a thing here in Vegas forever. Friday nights usually people will line up. I guess in the age of direct deposits, probably less important. HR companies, the HR department is going to hate us because they're just going to switch back to paper checks to take advantage of this. But no, when I hear longhorn, longhorn, I assume you get a free stake if you cash your check there or something, you know, bad joke alert. But I would do it. I mean, if you have a check and if you can, but you got to know yourself, if you know that you can go in there and just get the free spin, hope to get something worth something and you could leave or maybe grab a drink or whatever and not gamble a lot, but you definitely don't want your whole salary sitting there and you're like, oh, let's go to the table and see what happens. You know where the best one probably is? Where? Perum. Of course. We have a traffic solution for all the problems with i15. It's not the bright line train. It's not a new lane on the highway. It's just the shoulder and they finally finished this paving project or redoing the shoulders so that five miles stretch of i15 over the border in California can be used on Sundays and Mondays only. So they will only open it up during high traffic times. But yeah, instead of paving a lane, they just let you drive on the shoulder. That's how we do it here. There's so many things I don't get about this. One, like, why just the right shoulder to left shoulder looks just as wide. Why not both? And only five miles, is it really do anything besides just get you aggravated all over again. When you have to merge back down, I feel like it would make it worse because you're already in three lanes and moving, you know, as you're going to be moving, going to five for a minute and then back to three is going to just back it up even worse, I think. It'll help in that one spot because that's one bottleneck, but there's another bottleneck as you point out down the road. So it's not a solution. There's a ton of road that's still two lanes in between Baker and Barstow and other spots on i15. The crazy thing is Gavin Newsom announced this, what, almost two years ago I want to say, so I don't understand how it took them so long to do this. Seems like they could have done a lane, but California has no priority to fix this problem. So I don't think it's going to get any better. I would predict that we don't see a third lane all across i15 in that area before the Bright Line train. I think the train's going to get here first. You're doing this on Sundays and Mondays from what, like 10am to 8pm or or something like that. So then you're going to have people trying to do it other days and saying, hey, I thought this was the rule, like just to allow it to be done all the time or you should just made it a lane. It's too confusing and it's going to lead to people getting upset. One, people won't know it's there and they'll try to, you know, put their car out there to block people and it'll be fights and accidents and so it's just a terrible setup. The last time I drove it a few months ago, somebody was using the shoulder because they already had some lines painted there. Somebody was using it even though they weren't supposed to and they weren't any police, although there is a California Highway Patrol substation there. So I wouldn't try that. Outside of those hours, you'll probably get caught, but I guess this is good if you're driving in from LA. So I can't wait to see how this looks in practice. So at the end of our last show, you brought up all Net Arena, kind of as a throwaway, but they're back in the news because this project might finally die. Now, first thing, we got a picture of the pit in the ground and there was still a lot of water in it and it just looked like the old wave pool from Wet and Wild, which gave me joy. You know, they could maybe sell some tickets, let us go swimming in there, but their deadline is September 6th. So if they don't do something by September 6th, they're done and the county commission basically hinting they're not going to get an extension. So maybe finally, that land can go to somebody who will build something. Yeah, it's kind of sad that the commission's finally saying we're not going to extend anymore. That should have been done a long time ago. And it's just saying, I was thinking about this. I never went to Wet and Wild when it was there, but how cool would it be to have a water park on the strip these days? I know that with property values, whether at it would probably never make economical sense to do it, but that was just such a cool thing to have. And I'm sure people that live in Vegas or visit Vegas would love to have that option of something to do, especially in the summer months when it's so hot. It would be something so cool to have there, you know, rest in peace, Wet and Wild. We do have a couple of water parks, you know, we have Cowabunga Bay and then Cowabunga Canyon, which was another Wet and Wild, but they're in local areas and they're not on the strip. So completely kind of different thing. So the locals do have some outlets there, but I grew up at the Wet and Wild on the strip, visited there. I don't know, dozens and dozens of times as a kid. Love doing it. My parents just love to set us loose in Las Vegas. So usually one day we were at Wet and Wild all day, which was me and my brother. So no parental supervision or anything. And it was a great old school water park. And it's just such a shame that it closed because it was profitable, but it closed for a condo tower going into the great recession that fell through. And then Jackie Robinson has been pushing all net for I think close to 10 years now. And he announced last year he had $5 billion in funding secured. They said you have to start construction by September 6th. He hasn't. Let's let this thing die as much as we like to make fun of it. I think dirt doesn't count. I mean, just pushing dirt around. They got the water. They got the wave pool. Maybe that counts. Maybe that'll be their argument in front of the county commission. I don't know, but that's a prime piece of real estate. And you know, a fountain blues opening, so the North strip getting more stuff. So it'll be interesting to see if anybody else tries to pick this up or if he tries to start over and do this thing all over again. I don't know. If he does, he will have to start with all the permitting again. If they don't approve an extension on September 6th, so we shall see. Yeah, let's hope not. So we talked about the pen entertainment, bar stool sports, weird sort of thing. And then they partnered with ESPN bet. So there's a lot of these like co-branding partnerships and sportsbooks these days. And Venetian debuted their Yahoo Sports Book by William Hill. And it looks really nice. They released some concepts. I haven't been there, but you know, it's a renovated sportsbook. I don't really understand what the Yahoo tie-in is. How does that benefit your sportsbook in any way? That's really where I'm confused. ESPN bet I can see, but Yahoo, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, half the people going there don't even know what Yahoo is. That was a very 90s thing. Yahoo was the Google before Google. But nobody, you know, most of these people going into the sportsbook don't know the Yahoo name. Don't read Yahoo Sports. It's just weird. And then it's run by William Hill, which is owned by Caesar. You know, this is all just a weird podge podge of things thrown together. It looks nice. I really, I think the one thing that kind of messed it out to me was the caves or the dens that you can set up where you get like a private little room with huge TVs and stuff. And they said, one of them, the largest one you can watch up to five, five games at one time, or was it eight games? And I think that'd be really cool for like March, man, as if you could get if you're a high roller and all your buddies hang out in there and watch all the games at once. Yeah, we've seen a revolution in the sportsbook spaces, right? I mean, Circa and there's so many of these renovated ones and they're looking better and better. And this one does look great. The name aside, it's a little confusing. But if that's what they had to do to get this thing up, it looks good. And those man caves are kind of a cool concept. And like 98 inch TVs, I think they said in there. So yeah, we're heading to like a new era. It's a lot more exciting than like the old man sitting in front of the race in sportsbook 30 years ago, watching horses go or whatever. Yeah, but it's, I mean, it's crazy that they're investing all this money and stuff into sportsbook because we've seen we did the numbers a couple weeks ago. Sports betting doesn't bring, you know, the margins are thin. It doesn't bring in a ton of money. So I'm surprised that they would put money. Maybe they've, you know, realized that that brings people in and they gamble elsewhere. It's been money elsewhere on the property. I'm just kind of surprised the investment level they're putting into this knowing that it isn't such a great money maker for them. Another interesting story this week, Bellagio was sold, quote unquote. Few years ago, MGM sold Bellagio to Blackstone or at least 95% of the land of Bellagio. They kept operations and they pay rent and that goes up 2% a year. MGM also retained 5% ownership in Bellagio's land, but Blackstone's selling off like 20, what, 22% of the land to a company called Realty Income Corp and they're going to kind of take over this. What's interesting about the story is not that Blackstone's sort of splitting up their ownership. It's sort of the vision that in 10 or 15 years, these are just going to be reeds and you're going to have like multiple owners and multiple stakes. How does that affect these casinos long term? Maybe the argument is the operations are locked in it won't, but you have to think this murkies the water and I don't know what the, and result of all this will be, but I expect we'll see more of these sales where portions of the land are sold off from companies like VG and Blackstone, etc. Maybe we'll be like your Green Bay Packers where everybody can own a share of Bellagio land stock at some point or like you buy a little bit. That would be a good way to do it to raise money. Sell off bits of your land to everybody that loves your casino brand and build it up from there, but no, I mean the biggest worry is, and we've talked about this, you know, where does maintenance go? Who's in charge of that? Is it the MGM that's running the casino or are they in charge of it? Or you know, since they're paying rent to the lease, should the property owners be taking care of things? I think my biggest fear is that we'll see like circus circus kind of go everywhere across the strip, just everything looking kind of dirty and drab and not being taken care of. You hope that they would invest in it anyway because it brings them more money in the long run, but that's not what we've seen so far since this all started. What's ironic is that circus circus is one of the few properties on the strip that's owned by the operator owns the land, which is which is funny there. Another interesting aspect of this is when Blackstone bought the property, it was valued at $4.25 billion and as part of this sale, it's valued at $5.1 billion. So the asset has gone up for them and they're selling off to basically give distributions and that's what they need. They need cash, but they're made money and you know, they are a company that's going to buy and sell and that's what they're going to do. So we'll keep a closer eye on some of the other casinos. You have to think like I said, Vichy is so big and they own so much that we might start to see more of these microsales or whatever, but we don't really know how that'll affect things long-term. I did want to look at this. I was at Bellagio a couple of weeks ago. I do need to talk about the spa tower. There's just been so much news, so I'll hopefully get to that in the next show, but I did want to show the garden table because I finally got to kind of, I didn't get to eat there, but I got to kind of experience what it was like to be in there and see sort of the atmosphere for people. You are definitely on display in this table and for people who don't know, this is a table inside the conservatory. During the day, if you want breakfast or lunch, Sadelles will serve it and then at night, Michael Mina will serve it and they have like a set menu there for you. And it's really cool, like you're just sitting in the middle of the conservatory. If you don't mind people staring and taking pictures and videos of you, because you're going to be in like a gazillion videos, but I think it's a neat experience and the price isn't too crazy. It's not cheap, but it's not like insane over the top. I also love the current display, so I just wanted to show some video, throw up some video of that. Yeah, loving it. I wrote up there. I don't know if it would be for me because I wouldn't really, can you enjoy it that much of everybody's just taking pictures of you? For people that like to be center of attention or definitely people on Instagram and stuff like that, this would be like a perfect fit for them. So I think it would be really cool, unique. You get different views, you know, you get to hang out in the conservatory for a while. You get, you know, more unique than anything else. So I can see the pluses and the minuses and it just depends, you know, I wouldn't plan on the food being worth the price tag. It's more just the experience of it to say you did it. I'm sure after 10 minutes, you just stop caring that people are watching you. Yeah, it seemed to be the case with the people that were in there. You're paying an upcharge for this, obviously, but Sedell says good food. Michael Meena has good food, neither restaurant is cheap. So, you know, you're going to get decent tasting food, I would say, or hope anyway. Now let's talk about real, Mark, because there's some fun stuff that came out of real, including some shots of the new of the new rooms. And, you know, so we saw the concept art or actually, I don't even think it was a concept. I do think the pictures we had a few weeks ago were actual pictures of the room, but these are different angles and stuff and we get a better look at the bathroom. And, you know, start looking at these pictures and then you kind of look at the bed and then you kind of squint your eyes and then I zoom in and what do you think was not on the bed? It was the whole room is dressed up and then no pillows on the bed. It's almost as if they wrote it for us. No pillows, no sheets, none of that, which I know will come up in a second. But yeah, there's a throw pillow in there and then the worst table in the history of tables in the Fred Flintstone State table is there, which is so hideous. I don't know why they put it in there, but everything looks exactly as how we thought it would. A little bit cheap and low end, not great. The carpet looks pretty rough, pretty thin. So be interesting to see how long these last before they get beat up pretty bad, you know, I don't think they'll last on, but I can't get over how ugly that table is. There are things I like in this room. There are things I don't like. Overall, the whole design scheme seems like it's from 15 years ago and not from today. And that's sort of my big problem with it. But you're right. It's cheap. People have been saying, you know, roadside, hiate, things like that. But we have our guy on the inside. The same guy who sent us the fountain blue carpet pictures has moved to Rio now. And what he said, and I want to quote him directly, he said, Rio carpet sucks. It's so 70s. The whole remodel is cheap and very demoying Iowa motel six quality. That's what a guy who's working on that. And yeah, I don't know if I'm that harsh based on the pictures, but yeah, not not good information coming from him. Yeah, and he just came from fountain blue. So he, you know, he's seeing both ends of the spectrum. So I'm guessing that skews it a little bit more like you just come from high end finishes, done, you know, good design, all that stuff. Everybody loves the look of fountain blue. And then you come over here and you see this. So I'm sure it made it seem worse than it actually is, or at least I hope it does. The rooms are still some of the biggest and Vegas. So you're getting a big footprint. So that you still have that going for you at least. Yeah, there are far worse rooms in Las Vegas than these. I should point that out. Dreamscape did say they were going for approachable luxury in this property when they renovated. That's one of the things they said over and over and over again. This room does not seem like approachable luxury to me. It just seems like a high-at-place room or something like that. Just a limited service three-star ish hotel, but reserve judgment. Hopefully the materials aren't as cheap as he says. Rio has been known for not having pillows. We suspect that Caesar's isn't investing anything, but also apparently planted Hollywood had a fire. And now they don't have sheets. Somebody let us know on Twitter that they're only using one sheet instead of two at planted Hollywood these days because of the fire. Apparently they can't get restocked in time. Yeah, you know they don't wash that duvet every time. So that's kind of gross that they're just doing one sheet. I'm like, you know what I mean? You own multiple properties. Go borrow some sheets from somebody and you can get an order in within a day or two. Like I worked in the linen business for a long time. You can get sheets. That's not a problem. This is just disgusting. I mean, it's just the house keeping and Caesars on all aspects. It's just been terrible. Rooms are dirty. I haven't had a clean Caesars room since COVID. I don't think. So a quick formula one update here. And I think formula one might be struggling to sell tickets. And there's still a lot of tickets available. But specifically we've seen some like backtracking on the hotels. And I noticed this starting with Sahara. I actually got an ad on Twitter from Sahara saying our formula one rates and whatever. So I click through it and they had a special $294 a night for that Friday and Saturday night, which is significantly cheaper than anywhere else, even cheaper than Circus Circus, far less than the prices were a couple months ago. And that's plus taxes and resort fee. But then I also started to see. Did you see how big the taxes and resort fee were? Yeah. Well, yeah, I was. But that was for two nights. It's still far cheaper than anywhere else on the strip. But then we saw rumblings. I had a couple of viewers mentioned that they're receiving Comps now from MGM. I had somebody mentioned they're receiving cop offers from Cosmo. And we also saw other people confirm that on Twitter. So comp offers going out hotel prices coming down. I think the bad part is anybody who booked. I think they're all on non-refundable rates. So if you already booked your room, you're kind of screwed there. But if you were kind of considering coming, keep an eye open because I suspect the prices will continue to fall. As it gets closer because there's a lot of hotel rooms to fill. Yeah, I think that's the big thing with all like one time sporting events like this. There's a risk waiting until right near the end of it. But usually you can get a better deal. Doing it that way. So unless you just got money to burn, it's always better to kind of sit and see how it plays out. I mean, even if you buy later, you usually only pay a little bit more than than at the initial offering. That's the gamble you take. Hey, it's Vegas. That's what it's all about. So take that gamble. People are predicting Doomsday. I don't think that's going to happen. But it's an interesting thing. We'll keep an eye on for you. And let's close with a fountain blue update. We know the standard rooms are going to be right around 490 square feet, which is a little bit. I would say on the small side for a luxury hotel, but they have some really beautiful suites and all kinds of interesting furniture. As we've talked about, we kind of knew what the overall look would be, the aesthetic in the rooms. I like the rooms a lot. The carpet in the standard rooms, not my favorite. I don't hate it. We showed pictures of it before. But it doesn't like grab my heart, but I do like that rooms. I think it all looks really good. And some of those suites are pretty sweet. Yeah, the and the carpet they use in the main areas they should just use in the rooms because that carpet is awesome. But I understand wanting to change it up a bit, so you're not seeing the same thing the whole time. Yeah, I think the color scheme and everything designs a lot like what we've seen with Bellagio and others, the blues, the cool tones, all that stuff. I do think they have a little bit more pop in their art and furniture selection. So I really do like it. I wish it had a little bit more Vegas tie in there, which we've set a lot. I think Circus is the only one that really nailed that the color scheme and bringing in some Vegas mist to it. So, you know, we're missing a little bit of that, but overall, I think it looks great. I agree. Of all the new rooms we've gotten in the last few years, I still think Circus are the best. They're not the most high quality. They are high quality, but they're not that top top level quality as far as the finishes, but just the overall design color scheme, everything, those deep blues and that Vegas tie and I love the wallpaper and the bathroom. So that's sort of my thing, but that's a whole different sort of concept than what fountain blues going for. I think it looks good. I like it. I can't wait to see it. So here comes the rumor told us that the rumor going around fountain blues construction site is December 2nd for possibly a soft opening by source said 75 to 90% of the rooms would be ready by then. So maybe not the entire portfolio of rooms available, maybe not like a full grand opening that day. Maybe it doesn't happen, but that's sort of what people are talking about on the fountain blue job site. And if that happens, Mark, it'll be open for your trip. Yes, perfect. I'm really rooting for this. And hopefully if they have the rooms, you know, 75% they don't overbook it like a resource world did and then have to walk people from Croc Fords, which was a, you know, kind of a sour point to the opening. And you know, we saw a rumor that they're not even letting you use the Croc Fords check in if you're not staying in a suite at Croc Fords, which I find just bizarre. Sure. Yeah, that's that's crazy. But I'm excited for this. You know, early December makes sense. It's right after F1 so they can grab those headlines kind of like what Durango wants to do and all that. So I think, you know, we're in there. And then maybe Chris Angel will be out front selling timeshare. You know, who knows? Let's hope so. Let's hope so. So much news this week is just so packed full of stuff. And it's good to finally see some stuff. We're seeing renderings. We're getting a lot of Rio stuff. And it's good to see that Rio is moving with these rooms. I know we're kind of negative. I will reserve hope. And we also have a whole other tower, which we suspect will be higher end rooms or at least higher than these in the mass grade tower. So let's not write the story about Rio quite yet. And give these guys a chance to turn this thing around and renovate their casino. And I want to be I want to be very clear about that. So Mark, one of Vegas's most famous entertainers is back on the strip at Planet Hollywood. He tweeted it out. He didn't even need to describe it. All he did was say the hashtag back. That's all he said. Good to see him back on the strip. Do we say famous or infamous? At least on this whole infamous. Yeah, it looked like he had like a drink. You know, I'm sure it was water, but it just seemed like the whole thing seemed like he's like, you know what? I'm back. I'm going to be a little buzz. Let's have some fun. So I thought that was kind of funny. That's the what I took away from it. I mean, how many of those seats do you think were seat fillers? I don't know. To your point, it was a cool tweet. Cool vibe of the video. Give him credit for that. He's back. He's got a lot of fans line up to go see him. Everybody out there. You don't get much better than that magician who shall remain nameless. No, I mean, it's cool to see him back and good for him. You know, he's been away for a little bit. So I'm glad to see that. The perfect setup would have been for him to show his videos to the to the audience at the world's biggest movie theater at the sphere. That's where they should have had to come back. Well, he's still working on it. Bellagio is in the news. It's turning 25 and you know, we've talked a lot on this show how we don't think Bellagio measures up the properties like win. And they're countering that by being bougie as hell. Should I say that they have their 25th anniversary $10,000 a person. And this is going to be like a three day thing that includes tastings of wine. You're going to get caviar, a Kobe beef, just about everything. Insane prices. I'll throw some of the stuff on the on the screen, but it's basically an over the top extravaganza of food and experience to celebrate Bellagio's 25th. Yeah, I mean, I'm reading this like before the show and what it's what it says you get for $10,000. I'm like in the dude where it wears my car, you know, like, and then, no, and then. And then I'm just waiting for something else. Like, do they get golden crusted forks with this that they get to take home? Like, you get like three dinners? I don't, I don't understand. I didn't, I didn't think it was worth $10,000 to me. I think it's just a lot of fancy food from celebrity chefs and some of the better restaurants like Picasso and the vault, which is their new sort of bougie lounge that we should talk about now. And this is kind of in time for Formula One. This is a 30 seat lounge that is in the old, I think, Casino Cage host area. And it's super high-end. I think their regular cocktails are $55 each. And then they have like really rare spirits. I know they were talking about like Bacardi rum from the 1960s, which, you know, rum is not usually sold as age. So it'd be interesting to taste some of that. But some of those cocktails are going to be $100 in up with those really rare spirits. It looks really nice. It's a beautiful space, super high-end. And if you want to get reservations or get in there, you have to like DM them on Instagram or you know, fill out a form. So it's not somewhere that a lot of people are going to get into. And they said they're not really trying to turn it over. They don't want to do 400 people a night. This is supposed to be an intimate setting, dress code, and you're going to pay for it. Yeah, I didn't like the whole Instagram thing that you have to do it that way. I found that kind of annoying. But I, you know, I get that that's where we're at kind of now. And I think it, this actually, you know, we made fun about the $10,000. When you're talking high-end cocktails, I think the people that appreciate those will find the value in it. Especially, you know, you brought up the Bacardi, like they found it from when it used to be, I think in the Bahamas, when it was bottled there. So this is before they moved it. So I wonder, I know people that are really into rum and stuff can probably taste the difference from that. So they'll probably find it worth it. And at $55, if you go to a high-end cocktail bar in any major city, it's going to be $30 to $40 for these type of craft cocktails in like an intimate setting. So I get $55 doesn't seem terrible. When you're talking about that, now they're premium with these bottles that took a month to get or like $150 and the food is insane. But I thought it was the most interesting thing when they're like, yeah, we expect you to spend hours here. I'm like, I don't know that that many people want to spend a hundred bucks of drink for hours. I was like, this would be cool to go in for one drink and check it out and leave. But it doesn't seem like they want that at all. Yeah, and I think that's probably going to work because they're not trying to, you know, put a ton of people through. So they don't need to get a ton of people willing to pay for this. And you know, it's sort of exclusive. They said the liquor selection is more exclusive than even the mansion at MGM. So the most exclusive of their lounges, this has better liquor than those. So, I mean, they put a lot of effort into this beautiful space. They want to track to high-end clientele. And I think they will just because of the limited size. If this was a bigger venue, I think it'd be harder. And all I can say is hopefully they get better service than we did the last time we were there last year at the cocktail lounge at Belagio, where the waitress was so, so rude to us. Oh my god. I'm like two o'clock when it wasn't even busy. So we have a few random Vegas food things to talk about just because we kind of collect these interesting things that are delicious to us. And, you know, we haven't had a chance to work them into the show. This first thing is a thing I've seen before. Like, I don't know how to pronounce it. I think it's a jarsky, but it's this bread with eggs inside a cheese. A jarsky or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Correct us in the comments. But it looks delicious. I've seen this before. I've never actually tasted one. And it's looking really good at Manon Bakery. And Las Vegas Phil shout out to him. So much good food content. He puts on Twitter, Instagram everywhere. I've never heard of this before. I'm sure it's bigger in certain circles or certain areas of the country or in the world. But it looks amazing. Like, it's got everything you want. Some bread, some eggs, some cheese, salt, pepper, and you mix it all together. Almost like, kind of like a soup bowl that you dip it in and eat it up. It looks amazing. And I definitely want to check it out now. So the next thing is also from Las Vegas Phil. This is something you put about a month ago, I think. Pepperoni rolls at above the crust. And this looks like way too much butter for me, Mark. I, you know, it's not my cup of tea. I don't know. Yeah. You like it. You just got, you got to be like near the bathroom when you eat it probably. You know, it looks amazing. I'm sure it smells great too. Like the butter and the garlic and all that together. And I love anything pizza, pepperoni related. So this looks great. But yeah, it definitely is a lot. Like, when they're dipping it fully in there, submerging it, it's kind of crazy. Finally, what I discovered at Planet Hollywood at Earl of Sandwich. So strange that they have hand carved dinners every night from four to 11 p.m. This is actually a great deal if you consider where it's at. I haven't tried it. So I don't know the quality. But I do love Earl of Sandwiches sandwiches. But you can get a hand carved roast beef dinner for 20 bucks or the turkey dinner for 20 bucks. And yeah, at your sandwich place in Planet Hollywood, very strange. Yeah. So weird. Like a fast food place technically and you're getting like a carving station. But and that goes to show like Planet Hollywood. We've talked about so many times how the mall has so many good deals. And this is another thing. I know it's just off the mall. But another place right there, like you can kind of go around the whole mall area in Planet Hollywood and have, you know, eat all day and drink all night and not spend a lot of money. That's really like the best spot for food and drinks in Vegas if you're looking for deals. Yeah. You're you're roast. I don't know. It's just it's just so weird. Hi. Yeah. Their sandwiches are great though. So let's talk about Durango. And we learned some more about what we're going to get inside Durango. Specifically, this new venue called George Sportsman's Lounge. And they're moving into Durango with this 24 hour venue with live entertainment, bar top gaming, sports viewing, food and drinks. Just it looks gorgeous. Can we just like say 24 hours, like 10 more times because that's what we need in Vegas. Yeah. We don't have it anymore. 24 hours is so huge. And I mean, it looks amazing. It looks like anything you'd see at the higher end because he knows on the strip. And I think that they're doing really well with with Durango. Everything we've seen looks great. And I think it's enough to pull in tourists from off the strip to go check it out just like you see with Red Rock where people will take that drive just to go see that property. I think Durango is really right in that ballpark. It's going to be great for locals. And I think there's going to be a lot of tourists that go check it out too. I think station casinos is killing it. We saw them do the renovations at Red Rock. So they've made that product more modern. They're doing the same thing at Green Valley Ranch. And I think they're trying to align those more with Durango. And I agree. This looks spectacular. And then we've also seen over the last few months, other sort of concept art as they've been rolling this out. Of course, we've seen they eat your heart out food hall, which I love that name, which will have 11 venues within it. There's the summer house restaurant with the beach theme. And that's also going to have an outdoor pool area attached to it. The pool area looks great. I agree with you. I think this looks like a resort that you could put on the strip and people would love it. I kind of knocked it out of the park at least with the concept art and some of the sneak peeks we've seen inside. Yeah, I think I'm excited to check it out. So and I never would say that for something off the strip that much. But I'm definitely going to go see it when it's open. So let's move on to Cromwell, your favorite hotel. The one I love to hate was underrated. And Carrie Balicki, she shared on Twitter. I don't know like what she does, but she shares all kinds of cool stuff. So she's a great follow on extra Twitter. And she shared the boulevard suite at the Cromwell. Now I know you stayed in a suite a few years ago. I'm guessing it was this one because this is the smallest of their suites. There was no games or anything in ours. It looks a little bit different. We had like kind of like a corner suite similar floor pattern and a little bit of the layouts the same, but it's still a little bit different. You know, I don't know what my suite was called, but it was a nice suite and I enjoyed it. Yeah, I like this room a lot. It's much better than the standard rooms there. And I love the layout of it. That over just over a thousand square feet wet bar steam shower, you know, get the living room. You get a full-size refrigerator if that's important to you on the strip, but if you're going to be having parties and stuff in there, that would be nice. You get the views, but of course the windows are kind of limited just like every room at that property. It's a neat room and I hadn't seen a view of it before. And my thinking of Cromwell, even though I really don't like the regular rooms at all, I still think like when you walk into that casino off the strip, it's a gorgeous casino. And you know, you talk about carpet and what carpet you love and all that stuff. I love the smell of Cromwell. I don't know what it is. You know, even on the floor, like where you're going to your room, the smell on the elevator, the smell on the gaming floor, everything just smells good. And I really like that a lot. I do too. It's funny because I've liked all the last three versions of the property. The Barbury Coast was like this cool locals casino on the strip for many years and then bills when Caesars took it over her hair as at the time I think turned into Bill's gambling hall and it became this kind of quirky place that people really loved, good value and stuff. And then Cromwell, which is that sort of boutiquey, more higher-end feel to the casino. And they tried that in the hotel rooms, but failed in my opinion. But I do love the casino too. And it's been interesting. That's a property that's been popular through every iteration over the years. And I haven't paid attention to the smell other than there are some not so nice smells right on that corner just outside. I'll just say that, especially during COVID when it was closed mark. Oh, the smells. Oh, the smells over in that area. It was pretty bad. I can imagine. So quick formula one update. We're not going to talk about it again, but we're seeing even more comps going out to people who didn't have comps before, resorts world sending out emails saying packages are selling fast, but we really think that they're soft demand at this point based on all the data points and other people in the Vegas space seem to be seeing the same things we are. So keep an eye on that. If you want to come, I would keep waiting maybe, but look at your comp offers. See if you have a chance to do it. I would not come on formula one weekend unless you're going to the race. And you're going to have to buy a ticket, which is still expensive. That said, if you want to come, it might be an opportunity. And then let's talk to YouTube fanzone. They just announced we're less than a month away from YouTube's concerts at the sphere, the official opening of the venue. And they announced this fan experience called Zoo Station, a YouTube UV experience. And they say it's an immersive fan portal. I don't know, it's going to have a gallery with like 50 years of photos of YouTube, a pop up shop. They say Zoo TV cinema, which is daily film screenings curated by the edge and then a lounge for VIPs. So basically just merch and some kind of pictures and stuff, but it's nice that they're putting that together. And I wonder, you know, how they'll do this for other acts in the future. I think it's a good idea. You know, they're opening I think the week before the show. So anybody that's in town, a little bit ahead of the first concert can go check all that out. And you know, YouTube's been in 50 years, like you said, like it's been around forever. So they have a lot of stuff to check out. I'd be cool to see like over time, you know, how things have changed and what it looked like back then. And anybody that loves the band will probably love checking it out. It reminds me of like the stranger things immersive setup that we talked about, similar in that aspect. And I think they're doing this more and more with anything that's popular. It'll be interesting to see do they do this for other bands that come in and do longer sets or longer shows. We'll have to see how that plays out. But if you're going to the concert, I think that you're going to want to check this out for sure. One other sphere related thing, there's new visuals going up to that just came up this week. We saw the eyeball. We've seen all the sort of visuals over the last few weeks, but they're apparently more that they're working on. And according to this Twitter account that follows this fear very closely, he shared this video, said some of these new visuals, which are a little bit more intricate, took them a little longer to get them to work because they weren't showing properly. But so yeah, there's some new visuals, which you should be seeing right now. And that's good to go. It's like less than a month, very exciting. Can't wait to see this thing and go see a movie there and maybe a concert or two. But I know a lot of people are excited for this fear at the Venetian resort. And then let's talk visitors. That's marked the July numbers or in. And it's very, very interesting because people are still gambling more than ever. But we are seeing a maybe a little bit of a softening in the growth visitor volume, 3.527 million people. That's up 1% versus last year. But in 2019, we had 3.685. So it's a little bit lower than 2019. We'll go over some other stats, but occupancy compared to 2019, it was 91.1% and 84.2%. This year. So less people visiting overall, more hotel rooms, obviously, in that number. But we'll talk about the gaming revenue in a second. But is this a surprise to you? Yeah, a little bit. You know, we've talked about their money they've made over the last year or two as record breaking almost every month. And to see that it's at numbers that are still below 2019 is a little bit surprising until you realize how much more they're charging for everything. It doesn't surprise me that the room occupancy is down compared to 2019 because the prices are so much higher and people are probably staying or just driving in for the day or that type of thing or staying outside of town. So it's surprising and not at the same time. We've been waiting for the prices to come down. Maybe we've seen it starting with F1, you know, that they're dropping prices right and left. And maybe that will be like kind of the end of it. And we'll see them drop even further through the slope period and December and everything. I mean, I know everybody's looking for some relief for sure. So I went back to the numbers from 2019 because they actually during the pandemic, they would release the current numbers versus the pre pandemic numbers. But now we're just getting this year versus last year. So I went back to 2019 and I looked at average daily rate in 2019, 126.92 versus 163.14 in this July. If you adjust the 2019 numbers for inflation, it's at about 151. So we're still about $12 more even if adjusted for inflation. That shows you that the rates have gone up. But the revenue per available room. So this is the number they take all of the rooms, even the empty ones, and they take all the hotel revenue and they say this is the revenue generated in hotels per available room in the entire market. That was if you do the inflation adjustment, it was $139 in today's numbers, $137.51 in 2019. So on the hotel side, if you adjust for inflation, they're not making too much more than before. Yeah, that is that is surprising. But we are in all time high inflation since what, like the 80s, it's just been crazy couple of years. So I think that skews it a little bit more. Like it's not like the dollar is worth more. It's worth less and they're charging more. So you're getting like double whammy there, in my opinion. But it is surprising to see how close they are when you adjust for it. So let's talk about gaming revenue then, specifically the Clark County back in 2019, 861,415,000. This year over $1.2 billion. If you adjust for inflation, it was just over $1 billion in 2019, verse 1.2 now. So significant improvement, about a 20% increase in gaming revenue in Clark County, even when adjusting for inflation. This really backs up the fact that people are gambling more. They're still visiting in big numbers. The airport had its busiest July ever. Things are slowing down a little bit. We see the occupancy rate, but people are spending more. The casinos are still doing well despite what people might think. It defies logic to me. I don't I don't understand it, but it's crazy to see 20% with adjustments for inflation over 2019 is, it's pretty astounding, especially when you look at convention numbers are down, even compared to you know, last year, 2022, they're down so pretty substantially. It just wears this money coming from it's still all tourists coming into visit to gamble and it's not cropped up by people spending business accounts using their company's money to blow it in Vegas on dinners and drinks and all that stuff. So it's like people coming out of pocket. It's blows my mind. But you wonder we talked on the last show about the Belagio land sale and how it's getting split and you wonder why everybody wants to be in this market. Well, here you go. I mean, they're making money and they're doing very well historically, even despite you know, people thinking that the economic pressures are going to hurt Vegas, not saying it won't in the long term or things might not crash. But this is a year after year after year from the opening of strong, strong numbers going all the way back to 2020 basically when they reopen for the first time, 21, 22, 23. And when we're looking at only like a 1% year over year growth from those record visitor numbers, you know, it's yeah, Vegas is pretty healthy right now. That's what I'll say based on everything we see. Yeah, and it's just they're they're still building adding new rooms. It's going to get even tougher for them to fill, I think. But you know, we'll see how it plays out. Hopefully the prices stay high for all the new builds. Just tighten those slot machines and people will keep gambling. That's what seems, you know, lower the odds, add another zero on the roulette wheel. You know, do all of that stuff and that's the effect I think on the gaming revenue. Thank you for listening to the MTM Vegas podcast. Don't forget to check us out on YouTube where we release the show twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays. YouTube.com forward slash miles to memories and all of our biggest content can be found at MTM Vegas.com. That's post podcast videos. See you there. Thanks again for listening. Talk to you next time.