Is the Cosmopolitan too big to fail?
Against heavy odds, the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is a runaway hit. Hugely popular with tourists and locals, it still finds itself swimming in red ink. What can it do to turn things around?
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The Chandelier: In the center of the casino floor sits Cosmopolitan's literal crown jewel. The Chandelier is a three-tiered bar and lounge encased by two million crystals dripping in strands from the ceiling almost to the floor, creating the sense of a fantastical, inhabited chandelier. The designers of the Chandelier created a series of digital programming for both layers of strings, allowing for separate interactive experiences for viewers walking by and guests inside.
Monday
13 June 2011
3 a.m.
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Inside the Cosmopolitan
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del.icio.usGet an inside look at the last resort to open on The Strip for the next few years. The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas seeks to appeal to "the curious class," from a "restaurant neighborhood" with a secret pizza joint to its unprecedented number of rooms with outdoor terraces. The Cosmopolitan opens its doors Dec. 15, 2010.
By the Numbers
- Opening: Dec. 15, 2010
- Groundbreaking: Oct. 25, 2005
- Initial cost estimate: $1.8 billion (Oct. 2005)
- Final Cost: $3.9 billion
- Land: 8.7 acres between CityCenter and Bellagio
- Strip frontage: 335 feet
- Permanent jobs: About 5,000
- Rooms: 2,995
- Rooms with terraces: About 2,200
- Casino size: 100,000 square feet
- Restaurants: 12
- Bars and lounges: Four
- Nightclubs: One
- Retail space: 36,000 square feet
- Convention space: 150,000 square feet
- Spa: 43,000 square feet
- Pools: Three
Archives
- Cosmopolitan throws open doors to public right on time (12-16-2011)
- Cosmopolitan loses $56.8 million in first quarter (5-13-2011)
- Cosmopolitan opens high-roller suites to public (5-12-2011)
- Cosmopolitan named to Conde Nast Traveler’s Hot List (4-12-2011)
- Cosmopolitan owner expects to recover investment in resort (3-30-2011)
- Strip room prices no drag on Cosmopolitan's rates (3-14-2011)
- Cosmopolitan targets ‘curious’ tourists (12-12-2010)
- From art to dining, Cosmopolitain aims to be 'accessible and fun' (12-12-2010)
- CEO Unwin says resort’s indie spirit, novel offerings will set the property apart (12-12-2010)
- Steve Friess: A fitting end to Vegas boom era (12-12-2010)
- Staff putting finishing touches on Cosmopolitan (12-3-2010)
- New Year’s at Cosmopolitan: 1 room, 3 nights, $5,600 (12-2-2010)
- Cosmopolitan launches six-part video series ahead of Las Vegas Strip opening (11-30-2010)
- Killers frontman Brandon Flowers to highlight Cosmopolitan’s opening night show (11-8-2010)
- Cosmopolitan chief reveals more details about new resort (10-28-2010)
- Cosmopolitan’s jarring ad aimed at the ‘curious class’ (10-22-2010)
- Cosmopolitan announces lineup of stores, boutiques (10-20-2010)
- Cosmopolitan CEO plans to steal customers from Strip competitors (8-22-2010)
- Cosmopolitan resort-casino unveils Strip marquee (8-3-2010)
There’s little doubt about where the place to be is in Vegas on a Saturday night lately. If it’s early, it’s at Vesper Bar, where you sip a Moscow Mule and watch the beautiful people check in while you check out one of the floor-to-ceiling video art installations—perhaps the one of the couple dancing that could be a dreamy scene in "Mad Men." If it’s a little later, it’s small plates at Jaleo, with its self-proclaimed “world’s best gin and tonic” and the mosaic behind the bar that’s like a Vegas Botticelli. Or still later, at the Chandelier, where a woman in a dress made completely of feathers is eyed until the next spectacle wanders up the curving staircase. By 2 a.m., the place to be is Marquee, where the soundtrack will be the best cutting edge DJ from Germany, and the music won’t stop until after sun-up Sunday.
It’s all at the Cosmopolitan, which is making broad swaths of the rest of the Strip feel like the home of Orange County mooks, Tommy Bahama nobodies and fanny-pack hordes.
And Cosmopolitan has the crowds and the room rates to prove its coolness quotient. On an average weekend night, Marquee hosts four to five thousand. Scott Conant, celebrity chef at Scarpetta, tells me he has done 400 covers on some nights and had to send people away. As of mid-May, the weekend asking rate for June was $501 per night—tops in the city.
“The Cosmopolitan definitely did create a buzz and continues to maintain it,” says Robert LaFleur, an analyst with Hudson Securities.
The Cosmopolitan is the property, like the Mirage, Hard Rock and Palms in earlier times, that has finally revived the old Vegas rule that supply can create its own demand, that a new resort can deliver a snort of adrenaline to a boulevard in need of constant reinvention.
“Vegas needed a win, and this is a win,” LaFleur adds.
The only problem? The place lost money in the first quarter. A lot of money. And it cost $4 billion to build. And therein lies the challenge, not just for the Cosmopolitan, but for the rest of the Strip, as well. The newest generation of upmarket travelers has its own tribal tastes and mores, which raises the question: Can what’s cool now also be what’s profitable?
Before we get to that question, let’s explore what precisely it is about the Cosmopolitan that makes it so different than everything else.
Think in terms of Hollywood movies, of the same product chasing the same demographic. Then along comes something fresh that appeals to a different crowd. Like, say, "Black Swan," which, even before Oscar time, had delivered a whopping 1,323 percent return to investors.
If the rest of the Strip can sometimes feel like the same movie, the Cosmopolitan is "Black Swan."
The film business is an apt analogy, and not just because Cosmo denizens are likely fans of "Swan" director Darren Aronofsky. David Rockwell and his firm the Rockwell Group, which designed the Cosmopolitan, has done sets for theater productions such as "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" and "Catch Me If You Can" as well as the Oscars. He once described approaching his projects as unwritten scripts.
I asked him what the script at the Cosmopolitan says.
He says his goal was something new that celebrates, in an age when so many of us stare at screens all day, both three-dimensional spectacle and dynamic interaction with friends and strangers.
Now listen to how the design dovetails with the Cosmopolitan’s marketing strategy, as explained by Lisa Marchese, senior vice president of brand marketing: “People trade in social currency. We wanted them to have stories to take home.”
This may sound like a bunch of pseudo-intellectual blather, but it’s hard to deny that what our resorts must do is create memories, stories that people tell themselves and their friends. If they don’t have an interesting story to tell back at work on Monday morning, there’s a decent chance they won’t return.
To create excitement, Rockwell turned what many thought of as a weakness—the property’s small, 8.7-acre footprint—into a real strength. Most casinos are warehouses, football fields of tables, slot machines, wandering drunks. At Cosmopolitan, in case you haven’t been, everything is actually jammed together, but on several levels.
“I thought the verticality was an asset. You want to go level to level,” Rockwell says. He tells me he absolutely loves riding the escalators from floor to floor.
Then the big brainstorm—an object at the center that embodies what the place is about. A 45-foot chandelier that’s also like a tree house with a bar on each level. “A chandelier has sparkle, and your perception of it changes constantly depending on the light and where you are. And it’s a symbol of celebration. It would be the ultimate people watching place and have an urban sensibility,” he says.
And like exploring a big city for the first time, the Cosmopolitan offers surprises. And there are quite a few of them, especially for a casino. The vending machine with miniature art pieces (Art-O-Mat). The pool tables in common areas. The rooms with the Phaidon books and the now famous terraces that offer panoramic views. The restaurant “porches” that give a feeling of open cafes. The hidden (and delicious) New York City-style pizza joint with Pabst Blue Ribbon to boot. At the free Book and Stage, the indie pop of Best Coast, the bluesy jams of Robert Randolph & The Family Band and soul stylings of Fitz & The Tantrums. Or, Girl Talk, the mashup DJ of the moment, spinning a show at the pool, which works surprisingly well as a converted music venue.
Another big surprise about the Cosmopolitan: Locals are flocking to the place. I’ve been a number of times for work or concerts, and nearly every time I run into someone I know, including on Christmas Eve. I knew something was up when Vegas native and downtown lawyer and advocate Dayvid Figler told me it was the first place he and friends were going to on the Strip regularly since they inhabited a tiki place at the Venetian more than a decade ago.
And the biggest surprise of all about Cosmopolitan? No Cirque nor magicians nor impressionists nor past-their-prime rockers nor country nor pop stars. And no Prada. And no chefs who phone it in at some other resort. You know why? This will sound pretentious, but I’m pretty certain this is the Cosmopolitan’s thinking: Those things are no longer cool if they ever were. Or as Marchese delicately puts it, for certain people, Vegas “wasn’t relevant.”
Even Marquee, the hot spot most vulnerable to lowest common denominator thinking because of its potential to be a cash cow as a superclub, has gone off in a surprising direction by choosing cutting-edge electronic music over hip-hop and top 40. On a Monday night this year, I saw people who looked like they might be veterans of the Burning Man art festival in the Black Rock Desert in Northern Nevada.
But even when it went against the grain, Marquee managed to hit the zeitgeist dead on, as Vegas has suddenly become one of the leading locales for superstar DJs.
Rich Wolf, co-founder and principal of Tao Group, which manages Marquee, tells me he and his partners just had a feeling about it and wanted to “tap into the next wave.”
“We were told we would fail and end up abandoning the format. But to the contrary there’s more house music than ever. We felt the time was right,” he says.
Wolf says this insight came from traveling to major party spots around the world, where progressive house music is dominant, but where clubs often feature several musical experiences in different rooms.
That’s how Rockwell designed Marquee, with several rooms, including the Library, which has a fireplace, shelves filled with books from The Strand in New York—pointless? yes, but a sign of obsessive detail—pool tables and hipster rock and electro-pop that you might hear in cool Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Tao Group operates Tao at the Venetian and Lavo at the Palazzo, but I can detect Wolf’s favorite spot.
“The hotel has the air of a super sophisticated party place that was lacking in Las Vegas,” Wolf says. “The formula has worked, and Las Vegas sorely needed it.”
The formula has certainly worked for Marquee, and, thus, for Tao Group, but has it worked for the unlikely owner, Deutsche Bank?
Here’s where it gets tricky.
For all its success, Cosmopolitan’s path to profitability is hazy.
In the first quarter, it lost $56.8 million on revenue of $105 million, or less than half of what Aria and Bellagio pulled in. Some of that could be attributed to comped rooms, drinks and meals of $22.5 million, and the fact that despite high occupancy and room rates, the full inventory of rooms—2,995—won’t be online until late summer, according to an SEC filing.
Here’s the composition of revenue: Room revenue of $34.4 million; food and beverage revenue of $57.6 million and, $31 million in gross gaming revenue.
This means just a quarter of the resort’s revenue was from gaming, significantly lower than the Strip average of 40 percent.
I talked to a number of rival operators and consultants, to whom I granted anonymity so they would speak candidly. They tend to take the view that Cosmopolitan is an interesting space that’s great for Vegas but can never succeed without hordes of the mathematically ignorant, aka, gamblers.
“Unless they can attract more gamblers, they’re going to have a tough go of it,” one says.
A gaming consultant scoffs, “Without gambling, it’s a $4 billion hotel, and how does that work?”
Lafleur, while praising the Cosmopolitan for its early buzz, agrees that gaming revenue must rise: “They’re getting people into the clubs and the rooms, but not the tables or the slots. That’s going to be the very difficult challenge—to drive that gaming business while not affecting the important buzz.”
Indeed, a source at a rival operation suggests loosening the slots and going to single-deck blackjack and other gimmicks and then advertising those gimmicks heavily. To me this seems like a terrible idea that would ultimately damage the brand.
Lafleur concurs while noting that this is the Cosmopolitan’s essential dilemma: “That’s the double-edged sword. You want the beautiful people, but you need the fanny packs. There aren’t that many 20- and 30-somethings who give your place a nice vibe and a nice look and you need those people to lose money.”
The Cosmopolitan’s serious gambling problem would seem to be threefold: Informational, architectural and demographic.
The resort is a stand-alone property without the sophisticated database of gamblers so prized (and necessary) by the big players.
Analysts and operators marvel at the effectiveness of Caesars Entertainment’s program, which enables it to lure its best customers nationwide to their local casinos and then occasionally rewards them with a trip to Vegas, running them in a beautifully profitable circuit.
Marchese, interestingly enough, held a similar position at Caesars, or, as it was known then, Harrah’s.
She says Cosmo’s partnership with Marriott gives the company access to a huge and strongly loyal customer database, though those aren’t gamblers, per se.
Marchese also says by starting from scratch, Cosmopolitan’s rewards program, called Identity, which rewards for gaming and nongaming spending, could be designed as a new, superior product. She declines to give specifics, but says growth is strong.
As always, time will tell.
The second problem, industry people say, is Cosmopolitan’s architecture. Much of the cool stuff is on the second and third floors, where there’s no gaming to speak of.
This is probably why locals hang out at Cosmo. It’s a real public space without the maddening clatter of the machines we all endure at, say, every Station Casinos property.
We like the Cosmopolitan because it’s so easy to ignore gambling. We’re given a choice that’s seldom offered.
Other resorts constantly funnel people toward tables and machines, often purposely helping them get lost in the labyrinth. The genius of Rockwell’s design is also its very real weakness as a casino.
Finally, there’s the demographic problem. It’s not entirely accurate to say Cosmo appeals to a young crowd. The clientele at the Hard Rock and the Palms feels younger.
The Cosmopolitan is more expensive and thus a bit older. Still, it’s youngish, if upscale. The issue is whether these people are even attracted to gambling as a pastime in the same way older Americans have been drawn to it. Older Americans grew up in a world where gambling was illicit and maybe felt a little dangerous because it was banned everywhere but here and Atlantic City. Not so, this generation.
Harvey Perkins, executive vice president of Spectrum Gaming Group, notes how quickly and arbitrarily tastes can change—in World War II and the Korean War, GIs played craps; in Vietnam, they passed the time in other ways, which led to a craps decline.
Marchese says Cosmopolitan is focused on “activating the casino” and bringing back the “old school Vegas experience” to the casino floor. This means focusing on table games and creating a Rat Pack atmosphere. I’ve certainly seen energized craps tables on a Saturday night.
The Cosmopolitan is said to have acquired a bevy of heavy-hitter casino hosts, but “It’s hard to get these high-end players to move. Even if they can get a player to check it out once or twice, it doesn’t mean they’ll stay,” says Hunter Hillegas, editor of the blog RateVegas.
And the slots often look empty.
Hillegas says the empty slots are a significant and growing problem among young consumers, perhaps just manifesting itself a lot more intensely at Cosmopolitan.
“I’m 31. I have no interest in slot machines. I don’t find those machines compelling,” he says. “Table games are fun, and there’s an allure. James Bond was never sitting at a slot machine.”
LaFleur notes that for older players, spinning reels and bouncing pieces of fruit are perfectly fine, but people born after 1970 grew up with increasingly sophisticated video games that make today’s slot machines look unappealing.
Think of the Cosmopolitan’s customer: Perhaps a well-paid designer for Apple who lives in San Francisco and comes twice a year. Will he play a slot machine?
Dan Savage, vice president of marketing at game manufacturer Bally’s, says the company is investing heavily in games that are more sophisticated, skill-based and incorporate social media. For instance, the company hired a Mortal Kombat developer, among others, to produce next-generation games.
Marchese can’t wait. He says: Bring on those new machines.
“There’s always room for innovation and we want to be at the forefront of that,” she says.
Cosmopolitan, depending on your view, has shown itself to be either innovative, or dangerously naive.
One night at the lower level lounge right off the Strip, I heard Cat Stevens’ “Here Comes My Baby,” which Wes Anderson used in "Rushmore." This is a song I can’t imagine hearing in another casino, but one that somehow worked at Cosmo because it fit with the hard-to-define sensibility of a place that blends "Mad Men" and Wes Anderson and James Bond and "New York Magazine" and throws in a dash of Las Vegas to create its own cultural cocktail. It’s all very Las Vegas without being of Vegas, which is its appeal.
If it succeeds, it will have broken the mold and brought us something new. It would be a piece of Las Vegas a little less focused on manipulating customers to lose their money and more on encouraging guests—for a steep price—to soak up the energy of this great moment to be alive.
That seems like something to root for. I’m in: Go Cosmo!
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This is a really well written article. Interesting to see how they are doing a year from now. This is a very fickle crowd. Good luck to the staff and management.
Great article.
Reminds me of the time I realized that gambling was just an afterthought at Cosmo. That was the night I walked from the Mirage, past Caesars and past Bellagio to check out the poker room at Cosmo.
Great hotel, now if they only can find a way to move it to China.
apparently the place is designed more for eye candy than the world of gambling. without experiencing cosmo i would hate to say whats causing their profitability but this economy sure isnt helping.
I agree with the NVFisherman that this is a very well written article. It is an extremely challenging position that the Cosmopolitan finds itself in. Will they get back to basics or be absorbed by the MGM juggernaut? Perhaps, a competitor?
Anyone want to bet?
This casino treats slots and video poker machine players poorly.
I gave them a huge play when they first opened. I gave them $100,000 in action which means I wagered $100,000 throught their video poker machines. If you did this at Harrahs and were an out of town visitor in about 3-4 months you would be inundated with offers.
Free slot play, free rooms and free food. Do you know what I received from The Cosmpoiltan. Nothing. Not even a letter or post card or e-mail saying thanks for playing. I actually had to call up and beg for a room for a return trip. Even the Bellagio will mail you offers if you come in wager $100,000 in one trip. Wynn mailed me three nights and $1000 free play and a $600 food credit for giving them about $150,000 in play. I don't think it takes too much of leap to see why the Cosmo is suffering in gaming revenue.
$501 per weekend night? Wow. I miss the Stardust!
Mr Unwin I was in town 2wks ago and the room i had was outstanding! My friend Gary Lovechecks has a ton of players you take them one at a time , He gives his players a free room, when you have 30k room invetory you have to use them up, dont stoop to his play , Mr U . you know how to treat a player, that will make the Cosmopolitan casino more take. Best of luck.
Gaming is the hub! Herein, is the Rub :) Ok, I know!
The Cosmo with all it's glory would be a good fit for the MGM inventory. Nestled between City Center and Bellagio, the Cosmo would be a nice piece to fill in the gap between City Center and Bellagio, and to provide the much need foot traffic entry to City Center's Aria casino.
The logic would be for MGM to make an offer once they complete the Macau offering. Cosmo will continue shaping their appeal, with the intent of making MGM take notice. Yeah, right, MGM already has done the numbers. A little more red ink at Cosmo should do it. :)
Nah... still not buying. Just another monument to the stupidity of the over-worshipped markets. At the end of the day, this place is still A) a casino floor, B) a bunch of expensive restaurants, C) a bunch of expensive boutiques, D) expensive bars, a club, and, oh yeah, E) a spa. So what if it's little more clever packaging than CityCenter -- it's the exact same formula used by everybody else, up and down the strip. It's the flavor of the month and it's *still* hemmorrhaging money. The hobos will be lighting Sterno fires in there by 2015... CC, by 2014.
Parents: Tell your children to start paying attention in school, and civic leaders: Attrack employers that actually make or do something. THEN we'll have a positive economic story for the Valley. This story has already been written. Over and over, again. They'll all end with bankruptcy, relocation to Macau, and hobos and Sterno fires back here.
Like any business that seems "booming", but cannot cover a huge debt service, The Cosmo may be chic and cool, but cannot survive on red ink. We've all seen the newest "hip" trendy restaurants open up in whatever city we live in. The ones you cannot even get into during the first few months due to crowds, but in a short time tend to normalize (as the next "hip" joint opens down the street), and eventually fail due to heavy debt service.
Unless Cosmo is able to figure out how to shake more cash out of the pockets of gamblers, they cannot survive. Today's hot club is tomorrow's "old news". A lot of us don't need to be "seen" at these over rated night clubs anyway.
Like any business, cashflow is king, and if you're losing money on $500 rooms, you need to find that cashflow somewhere.'
Good luck, It may not be my thing, but I do hope they survive and prosper.
See you at the Imperial Palace!
Like many places, is this one making money before they consider their level of debt? Are they covering the basic operating costs?
If they are then in the future the bank that owns them will end up writing down the debt and showing this place making a profit.
That has become the common way of doing business in this downturn. Most all of the Casinos have been making money, they are just not covering the debt.
Time will tell and I wish them luck. They provided a lot of great jobs to deserving people and added something new to our great town.
No problem . They will do what Stations did when the FERTITAS ran the Casino to bankruptcy. Hire good lawyers/pimps and get their debt reduced and still retain control of the Casino. Same thing that happened with MGM. Cosmo is no big deal. If the tourists want to pay $300 + in room stay good luck to them. When I visit i can stay at the Trop or IP and hang out at the Cosmo or MGM, Wynn!
Good article. I live here and have visited Cosmo regularly since it opened. Really enjoy the atmosphere. As a matter of fact, I think Cosmo is what ARIA was supposed to be but came up short. Where Aria tries too hard to be cool, Cosmo does it without being forced, it just happens naturally, and that's good. Problem is, as mentioned, there's no play at Cosmo. And lost in the smugness of Marchese is her affirmation that the Marriott database doesn't help them at all. In addition, other properties do a better job of attracting high rollers. I've been in the high limit area quite a few times at Cosmo and it pales in comparison to Aria, Bellagio and even MGM. I've said this from day one and you can mark my words. MGM Resorts will sell Mirage to Ruffin for a billion, then acquire Cosmo. It's a perfect fit for them.
I didn't mention one of the great features of the Cosmo in my previous post. It's the outdoor pool party that rages all night. Should you happen to have a room facing the Aria you will hear a DJ over a sound system that can be heard on Boulder Highway into the wee hours of the morning. If you happen to want a sleep at a reasonable time say three in the morning. Good Luck.
As the article says, half the hotel rooms are online. When they have all those rooms into place, the Cosmo will do fine.
Look... It's a Hotel/Casino. You can put makeup on it. You can shower it in perfume. But it's still a Hotel/Casino. The same people that are there are in the Aria and likely in the Bellagio. The only thing special about the Cosmo is that it is new and once that wears off, folks will start to see reality and it will implode because the owners didn't understand the term "Saturation Point." If I were to compare the Cosmopolitan to a movie, I'd compare it to "Lost in Translation." Only instead of it costing 4 million USD to make, it cost 100 million USD. Get the picture?
It's a nice place to walk around or have dinner but a rep for being tight,tight, tight for slot players. I play $1 and higher slots and get killed at Cosmo plus the rewards program is a joke. If I play several hund. at MGM Grand or Ceasars, I get all kinds of room offers. I have recieved -0- from Cosmo.
The comments above are interesting. Many seem to have read the first half of the headline but not the article. Despite calling it a "runaway sucess" the facts are plain. It is losing money daily, not making, or covering debt - losing money.
Another example of a local writer making love in print to something he/she personally likes. This quote sums it up:
"I knew something was up when Vegas native and downtown lawyer and advocate Dayvid Figler told me it was the first place he and friends were going to on the Strip regularly since they inhabited a tiki place at the Venetian more than a decade ago."
The "Downtown" crowd is hardly a barometer of what's sucessful on the Strip since nearly every attempt to make Downtown "fashionable" has failed. Remember the cooler than coolest ever Ice House (no pun intended)? It's been sitting empty and derelict now for years. Oh and the Tiki place that he references...out of business less than a year after it opened. Why? Um because it sucked?
I love how the "natives" and downtownites turn up there way too cool for everybody noses at everything on the Strip as though they were born and bred in Milan and can't stand tacky tourism. They seem to forget that it was the Excalibur, the Luxor, Caesars, etc. that put their mule stop on the map.
No doubt Cosmo is arty and "cool" to the local wannabe hipsters but they don't have the cash to make her go for the long term. And frankly, if your slots business goes so do you. That's pretty simple. No casino in Vegas has ever succeeded on tables alone.
This article is so full of prosy personal opinion and devoid of logic and facts...wait...that's Vegas...
This past weekend we visited Cosmo again for the second time this year. We played the slots there on Sunday. We stayed and played at Planet Hollywood, and also gambled downtown at a number of casinos, including Golden Nugget, Fremont, and Golden Gate.
We did pretty well everywhere downtown, where we ended up a couple grand, were reasonably down at PH (after three days of intense playing), but were massively down at Cosmo. They do in fact have the tightest slots we experienced during this trip. All the profit we had from other casinos we lost at the Cosmo and then some; we ended up giving them close to a thousand dollars in about two and a half hours. Ridiculous. And the cocktail waitresses came by about three times in those 150 minutes.
As for their players club, are you kidding me? They give you food and drinks. Big deal. We had to wait in line at their Players Club ("Identity") desk for about a half hour to get a duplicate card issued (understaffed already?). Sorry,Cosmo, we won't be going back, I don't care how subtle your huge tree house chandelier really is.
I walked in once and only one single time. I was impressed by the chandellier, no doubt about it, it's just impressive. I wonder how much you pay for a Havanna /w coke... 18 ?
I proceeded to the players club to sign-up for my card and they gave me 10 dollars free slot play. Then I went to the videopoker machines and couldn't find a high payback machine, so I had to play on a 9-5 double-double bonus, perhaps it was an 8-5 machine, can't remember, but it's ok, it was free money. I played in quarter denom to put down the fluctuation and only bet 1 coin, so I had 40 hands to play. Amazingly, but it dealt to me 4 of a kind , and a high paying 4 of a kind, 4 threes, no kicker ,though. Finally, I ended winning 6 or 7 dollars, I cashed out something between 16 or 17, which isn't too badk with zero investment.
I left my players card in the machine as I will not return to the Cosmo again. I walked to the ticket-machine to get my money and that was it. The 16 dollars I won paid for my dinner at Ellis Island, and I also had some fun drinking beer at their bar. I don't need a Chandellier and a 3.9 billion dollar facility to feel good. If you just think about, if they built this place and used , let's say 3 billion dollars borrowed, at a rate of, let's say..... 8 per cent, then it means the house must "win" 240 Million Dollars per year, just to pay for the interest!!!!
Must be tough managing a place like this under such a big pressure.
From Switzerland
While i was there in New Years last year, the casino floor was dead. No one on any tables or anything. To me, it does not really offer anything, i would not rush to stay there, and the shopping centre attached to me is a waste of space, it lacks the character of Caesar's shops or Grand Canal Shops. Good luck to them, don't want to see them go anywhere.
I've been to Atlantic City, Foxwoods, Mohigan Sun, there still nothing like Las Vegas......My only hope is that the economy picks up and people will have money for gambling & entertainment.. too bad we could not have more chinnese come over and spend money, I remember back in the 80's visitors from Japan flock to las vegas, but now they got Maccu, Well I made my plans book 12 days at the Golden Nuggett in July...
Frank
From: South Florida.
I'm an Avid "Gambler" and have my fair share of Players Club Cards up and down the whole strip. I go to Vegas about 20 times a year and since the "Cosmo" opened it has been nothing but the "Best" at treating their guests. The only downside is their philosophy of "comping" a room but taking your comps to pay for it was and is an Old School way of deterring the "Serious Gambler". There was a time I didn't gamble at MGM Properties because they would hinder the gambler by taking my food comps etc. to pay for my stay and essentially "earn my keep". Caesars Properties DO NOT do this bait and Switch with the Serious Gambler. Cosmo will thrive but to become more profitable and bring in the SERIOUS Gamblers, they need to do away with the double edge sword of comping. MGM Properties finally went to the "M LIFE" system which is similar to "Caesars Entertainment's" Tier System and comp system. Now I've happily gambling and staying at properties that won't rape your comps from you. During these times I need my money or comps to go further than ever before. I do still gamble and LOVE Cosmo but their "Identity" card system needs a serious overhaul.
Caesars Entertainment= Diamond Level
MGM Properties= Platinum Level
Cosmopolitan= Platinum Level
Venetian/Palazzo= Gold Level