Wynn's Grand Opening, or Watch the Billions at Last
Tuesday, May 10 2005 at 21:59
2,700 rooms; minimum price — $230 a night; 70-foot waterfall and a 3-acre lake; 18 restaurants; chandeliers and lighting, heavy fabrics, mosaic tiles, precious woodwork, man-made mountain up-front, all summed up to $2.7 billion. That is, in few words, the reason why thousands of people felt they had to crowd near the Wynn resort on April 28, for the grand opening.
The opinions upon the newly opened Wynn tower are rather contradictory. Some say it doesn't live up to it's hype or that it looks too much like the older Bellagio, also built by Steve Wynn.
Others say that on the contrary, Wynn Las Vegas is in so many ways different than Bellagio or Mirage and that Mr. Wynn has definitely lifted the bar of hotel-casino standards in Las Vegas — a city that lives up to great standards when it comes to hotels and casinos.
The truth is on both sides. For the last five years, everybody knew this mega-resort was going to be the most spacious, the most sophisticated and the most expensive that the world has seen. And that it's going to cost $2.7 billion. While everybody was busy imaging how does “the most” look like, a few important things changed on the Las Vegas Strip: the new tower resort with a man-made mountain to hide it from street views and lots of amenities that would successfully make a self-standing town; not to mention a few new jobs that have been created along with it.
The “grand” opening was in fact calm and sober, Steve Wynn himself playing the host at the door, shaking hands with those lucky ones that got to be first visitors.
But Wynn doesn't stop here. The work goes on with the building of the $700 million Wynn in Macau, China, and that of the Encore, the $1.4 billion hotel-casino scheduled to open next door to Wynn Las Vegas in 2008.