Wynn Opens Up on New CC

Heidi Genoist -- Tradeshow Week, 5/2/2008 11:35:00 AM

Steve Wynn has been sitting on a secret for the last couple months, and it’s a big one – possibly as big as 1.8 million square feet.

The chairman and CEO of Wynn Resorts told investors and reporters in a May 1 earnings call that he was planning a new convention center for Las Vegas. 

“We’re planning two new hotels of approximately 2,600 rooms a piece that will straddle 1.6 to 1.8 million thousand [sic] feet, it depends on how you count it, of exhibit space that is,” Wynn said.

He added that the convention facility would be built on the site where the golf course is now located, and that it would extend “2,000 feet to Paradise Road, from an area approximately 550 feet east of our villas, so that there will be a large lake with fountains like Bellagio that will entertain both hotels and the convention and meeting space.”



Although Wynn said the plan was still in the preliminary stages, with drawings started a couple months ago, he hinted that he’d been thinking about it for some time.

What pushed him over the edge? “We were provoked into doing that when we heard that our neighbors next door were going to build a new facility on some property they own next door to us and expand their own inventories,” Wynn said, referring to the Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s Sands Expo & Convention Center/Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, across Sands Avenue from the Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino.

Sands has had on-again-off-again plans to build a large, new exhibit hall, but published reports have been unclear as to whether it would replace or supplement existing space.

That wasn’t all Wynn had to say during the call about the Sands, or about the Las Vegas & Visitors Authority’s Las Vegas Convention Center, east across Paradise Road from the Sands.

Wynn said that in building his own convention center, he would leverage his property’s choice placement between the LVCC and Sands Expo. He added that an integrated resort with 10,000 rooms and as much as 2 million sq. ft. of meeting and exhibit space (as he envisions his future complex) would help solve some of the problems the local convention industry faces. 

“There’s a big problem here in Las Vegas,” he said. “When folks go to the Convention Bureau, they stand in long lines to get taxicabs to fight their way back to the other hotels, and this tremendous crush of infrastructure logjam that we have here. And it happens when the shows open every morning at the Convention Center and when they close every afternoon at 5 o’clock.” 

As he envisions the future with his addition, visitors will be able to travel between the two centers and his own by way of the Wynn’s underground trams, “that will shoot them, free of charge, right to the door,” he said.
If Wynn’s plans unfold as he described them, he would own the second largest exhibit facility in Las Vegas. The LVCC has 1.9 million sq. ft. of exhibit space; the Sands (including the connected Venetian Resort Hotel Casino) 1.1 million sq. ft.; and Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino 934,731 sq. ft. 

Wynn said his convention center’s design would distinguish it from those presently open in Las Vegas. “That exhibit and meeting and convention space will resemble no other meeting and convention space anywhere else on Earth that we know of, in the sense that it will be very glamorous, and it will also offer our clients an environment that has heretofore been unavailable to them,” he said.

The LVCC is undergoing a nearly $900-million facelift that is expected to be finished in 2011.

Wynn said, “We’re going to take the convention business to another level, I’m hoping, and in the process, join hands with our wonderful neighbors, the Venetian folks and the Las Vegas Convention Bureau to make this just irresistible for all the conventions and folks that come from around the world to Las Vegas.”

He added that, through this partnership, he hoped to give convention competitors Orlando, New York and Chicago a run for their money.