Pinnacle Entertainment had its first quarter conference call today, and CEO Daniel Lee had some interesting thoughts on Atlantic City. I don’t usually do this, but here are some excerpts from the transcript by Bloomberg:
Well, we’ve been consistently saying we expect to build something on the same order of magnitude as the first phase of the Borgata, which was 2,000 guestrooms and a large casino and it cost 1.1 billion…. Now will that end up being 2,200 rooms or 1,800 rooms, will it have exactly the same number of restrooms, we don’t know. But it will be of that order of magnitude…by the time we open, we’ll be the second or third largest in town after the Borgata and possibly Harrah’s. And we’re going to come up with something that’s new and fanciful and interesting for people. We’ve hired some great architects, different teams of architects bringing different skills to it, and great designers to do something that would be more modern. You have to remember virtually everything in Atlantic City was built in [the] 1980[s] with the exception of Borgata, and it was built in a different era, and when guestrooms, for example, tended to be smaller… You had to be at least 325 square feet. I mean today even Holiday Inn wouldn’t put their name on a hotel with a 325 square foot guestroom. I mean that’s a very small guestroom. I think at Wynn they are 550 square feet and the kind of Marriot and Hyatt normally is probably around 400 square feet these days.
And more, about why PNK is keeping its plans close to the vest:
You know, it’s kind of funny — I spoke at the thing in Atlantic City on
Monday, last Monday at the American Gaming Associations sponsored. And as I walked up the stage I looked out at 400 people who all work for our competitors and my topic was supposed to be about what we were going to build in Atlantic City. When I looked them I say why the hell would I tell you guys about Atlantic City as you are all just going to respond to it, you know. And if I said we were going to have the world’s biggest sushi bar there will be two other sushi bars open before we could get open. And so we have a pretty good idea what we’re going to build in Atlantic City. We just have no good business reason to tell you, because telling you, we’re telling our competition. And so when I’m going to tell anybody until it’s too late for the competition to react to it.
Pinnacle Entertainment Announces Conference Call for 2007 First Quarter Results: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
If you want the whole transcript, you can subscribe to Bloomberg.
Here’s my two cents on the PNK project: they should seriously consider calling it the Traymore. You can read about the original Traymore here. It really was a ground-breaking hotel, and it would be possible to build something that followed William Price’s basic design principles and had the 2,000 rooms that Lee is talking about. As I’ve said before, this land should be home to something iconic, not just another boxy, nondescript tower or a Mirage (or Borgata) clone.
Part of the reason why the Sands failed is that it was basically a small Strip-style casino plunked down a block from the Boardwalk. Whatever gets built on the Traymore site needs to play off its surroundings, not ignore them.