[Update: VegasTripping.Com analyzed Wynn's remarks -- with illustrations! Check that out.]Steve Wynn had some good news/bad news for the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas during my wide-ranging conversation with him on Monday that is NOT authorized for use on the podcast. So you'll have to pay attention here and other places where I write as I figure out the newsworthiness of each bit. The Cosmo is expected to open in December.
Cosmo's good news: He liked the rooms.
Cosmo's bad news: He said the check-in/valet area is "dysfunctional."
Here are the relevant exchanges. I'm giving the verbatim because, frankly, his description of what's wrong with the valet and front desk was complicated and I don't have a site map to help work it out. It seemed better just to transcribe it and let the geniuses like David McKee and the fellas at VegasTripping.Com and RateVegas.Com explain what the hell he's saying. I'm just a vessel.
Friess: You toured the Cosmo?
Wynn: I took a quick look at it, I did. The rooms are very nice upstairs, as opposed to the Fontainebleau where they aren’t.
Friess: Ha. That's funny.
Wynn: No, I mean the Fontainebleau model rooms. They weren't nice. [The Cosmopolitan] has a nice room. Now, the property is so constrained by its size that it’s dysfunctional at its entrance, where people come and check in and go nto the garage. I don’t know about kitchens and back of the house and all of that. Are you asking for a technical evaluation of the building?
Friess: I was asking what your first impressions were.
Wynn: My first impression is they have very nice rooms, that the site has created unbelievable problems as far as access and egress for guests checking in and out. If you have some idea what the load on the Sunday check in and checkout is in the hotel, that place can’t work properly. I made a suggestion to the young man who showed me through as to what they should do almost at any cost if they can do it, and that is to somehow break through from Harmon to the street on the other side that goes between Bellagio and them. Right now, you go in on Harmon from the Strip. As you go under into the building right under the garage, you take a 90-degree right-hand turn and you’re headed back toward the Strip. There’s two lanes there. You’re in the bottom of the garage. And you stop the car, there’s about 10 car lengths and you go into the building there to check in, then you go forward four car lengths, and you have to make a 180-degree turn for cabs and people. It can’t work. If they can get through the building to the other side, they might be able to work it. They’ve got a real problem with check-in.
Translation for those of us without the mental capacity to parse out the spatial relations he's describing: If you can get inside, it's lovely. But good luck getting inside.
Ut-oh.
