RSS 2.0 FeedVol. 3, No. 10, October 2007, Nevada Q&A
Felix Rappaport
President, Luxor Las Vegas
With its pyramid-shaped building, giant Sphinx and obelisk, the Luxor has been an iconic property on the Las Vegas Strip since it opened in 1993. But as Las Vegas moved from the family-friendly, Disney World alternative of the mid-1990s to its current status as an adult playground, the property found itself lagging behind some of its competitors who had tapped into the younger, hipper crowd flocking into the city.
Just as Treasure Island ditched the Pirates of the Caribbean-theme and changed its name to simply TI, the Luxor is also looking to freshen up its appearance. While the pyramid, Sphinx and obelisk will all remain, the inside of the property is getting a complete overhaul.
New nightclubs, restaurants and other venues are coming in as MGM Mirage—which acquired the property when it bought the Mandalay Resort Group in 2005—looks to transform the property from overflow accommodations for the Mandalay Bay into a destination in-and-of itself.
Luxor President Felix Rappaport is leading the way as the property undergoes this transformation. Rappaport recently met with Casino Connection Publisher Roger Gros about the changes at the Luxor.
One of your last jobs before coming here was as president of New York-New York, another highly-themed property. When you first arrived at the Luxor, was your intention to deemphasize the Egyptian theme, or was that the result of focus groups or other factors?
Rappaport: I think that we always realized at New York-New York that part of the appeal of the property was that it was a fairly faithful reproduction of New York city in the 1940s. Luxor was a property that, in my opinion, was brilliantly conceived when it opened back in 1993—I happened to be opening Treasure Island at the same time, another themed property.
But while Luxor had been successful for years, we felt that the property hadn’t evolved properly. Even though it had great employees and was very successful, we felt that the newer properties were competing with it to the detriment of Luxor and we really felt it needed an infusion of new venues and new attractions. It really had been run in recent years almost as an adjunct to Mandalay Bay, which has this huge convention center. Here’s 4,406 rooms. It’s a great place to house people but the food and beverage options, the gaming and the entertainment had been deemphasized. It seemed to us that keeping the theme where it made sense, was the way to go, and deemphasizing it where it had almost become trite.
Are you keeping some of the Egyptian them?. You have the iconic pyramid, but are you going to have the Sphinx out front and the Egyptian statues inside?
Obviously, a pyrmid is a pyramid is a pyramid. The good news is that even though it has a specific time and place in ancient Egypt, we felt that the pyramid always promised this fantastic property, but when you got inside, it didn’t deliver on that promise to some degree.
At this point, we have no plans to get rid of the Sphinx, we have no plans to get rid of the obelisk, and obviously, the pyramid will remain. I like the entrance, quite frankly, there are some monumental statues. But, for example, when you walk in now, we have a video wall, we have a car that is part of a promotion we’re doing and we have sound and lights and music.
When we got here, the statues were there, but you felt like you were entering the British Museum in London. It just felt a little too static, and the reality is we’re in the gaming, entertainment and hospitality business, and we have things to sell and things to promote. We like to think we’re keeping the best of the best, but we also feel when we open a new bar or restaurant, we don’t have to stick to that Egyptian theme.
The Luxor is still an icon of the Las Vegas Strip. What is your plan to not only attract people to the property, but also to keep them here?
The three words we use—after much market research—are: intriguing, approachable and fun. For anything we do, we like to run it by that criteria.
Is it intriguing? Does it capture the imagination?
Is it approachable? We don’t want to be off-putting, overly formal or static.
And is it fun? We’re not trying to be the next grand property in town—there are some great properties like that including our Bellagio. We want to be fun.
That’s the approach we’re taking.
When the Luxor opened, Las Vegas was in the amusement park era. There were rides at MGM, and there was a ride here too, a water ride?
There used to be a Nile River ride. It was a clever idea, but probably ill-conceived, because they thought that people would get in this ride then go to the front desk and check in. Well, when you get off of a plane after flying in from the East Coast, you don’t want to necessarily prolong the check-in process. At the end of the day, 1993 in Las Vegas years might as well be 50 years ago. Things go so fast here.
When I opened Treasure Island, everybody was worried that they were going to run out of high rollers, so they started going after the families. People viewed Vegas as a variation of Disney World, almost. With MGM, Luxor and Treasure Island, all three operators realized pretty fast that gambling, and an overt marketing approach to families didn’t mix. MGM has now moved in a totally different direction, Treasure Island is now TI, and we’re trying to take Luxor in that direction.
As you reposition the property looking for an expansion of your market, are you looking to tap into any specific niche in the market?
Some people think because we’re going to some hipper, newer things, that we’re trying to be the Hard Rock or Palms. Both of those properties are smaller, they’re both very successful, and they’ve carved out a nice niche market for themselves. Our challenge is a little more substantial. We’re 4,406 rooms, we’re right on the Strip, and we need to be a lot of things to a lot of people. This property on the weekends is already skewed younger, while Sunday through Thursday we still have, depending on the convention at Mandalay Bay, an older and more diverse population. I think we’re trying to have the best of both worlds.
We’re trying to augment what we have here to appeal to and capture the younger market on weekends, the hipper market, and I think certainly that Sunday through Thursday we’ll have a major portion of the convention business as well. We can’t afford to back ourselves into a corner.
I’m very interested in this ultra lounge situation. There seem to be so many of them, and you’ve already got two of them in this property. You have Noir Bar and LAX, and you’ve got plans for CatHouse. Give us your philosophy on these venues and why you brought in outside management companies to run these clubs.
There are a number of reasons we brought in outside people. First, the nightclub business is a sub-business and a specialty that very few people do well. My opinion is the great nightclub operators, in this case Robert Fry and Steve Davidovich of Pure Management Group, they’re better at nightclubs than we are. They have better promoters, they have the celebrity contacts and they have the infrastructure that supports great operations.
So we feel LAX, as the newest, perhaps the most expensive nightclub in town, has already, in two weeks, established itself as the best game in town and certainly one of the best nightclubs in the world. LAX, in my opinion—when we’re talking about attractions, we’re talking about making the property stickier, when we’re talking about buzz, when we’re talking about celebrity presence—has solved a lot of problems.
Noir Bar is really a celebrity hangout within LAX. That was something Robert and Steve evolved as they made plans because they realized people like Paris and Nicky Hilton, George Clooney, P.Diddy and Christina Aguilera, all of whom have been here in the past couple weeks, they don’t mind hanging out in the big nightclub for a while, but eventually they want to have a quite drink and fun with their entourage or their party.
CatHouse is a totally different set of operators and a different idea. I look at LAX as our version of MGM Grand’s Studio 54, and CatHouse as our version of Taboo, and, in my opinion, they will be complimentary.
Are the clubs a pure play for non-gaming revenue, or is there some spillover into the casino there?
When LAX opened, the casino was packed. Our employees were elated because in the past several years we’ve been putting up construction walls and planning new venues.
When you walked around the property there wasn’t a table to be had. There weren’t too many slot machines and there weren’t too many video poker machines to be had. It energized the whole property. So, it certainly has had an impact on crowd flow and attention, and our numbers were up. That will increase as we find ways to cross promote.
We all know you can have the best amenities and the best facilities in the world, but if your employees aren’t behind you 100 percent, it’s not going to work. What do you do to motivate them to get them to provide the level of service for which MGM Mirage is famous?
First of all, I believe that the service equation begins with employees. Happy employees provide great service, which brings the customers back, leading to a profitable property. Here, out of approximately 4,200 employees, half of them are day-one employees, so they’ve been here 14 years, and many of them go back as far as 25 years with Circus-Circus.
My philosophy is to be on a first-name basis and accessible to the employees. Every Friday I meet with about 25 employees, we call it “Rapping with Rappaport.” I hate the name, but I love the concept. The concept is that they can ask me anything. It creates a very valuable dialogue because they need to be part of the program. We can’t do it without them. They’re the front-line people.
My philosophy is to treat everyone the same. And at the end of the day, we want to communicate with out employees and we want to recognize our employees. We want them to be enthusiastic, we want them to feel that they’re stakeholders.
I’m never happy unless anywhere I work is one of the best places in town to work, and that’s my philosophy.
Just as Treasure Island ditched the Pirates of the Caribbean-theme and changed its name to simply TI, the Luxor is also looking to freshen up its appearance. While the pyramid, Sphinx and obelisk will all remain, the inside of the property is getting a complete overhaul.
New nightclubs, restaurants and other venues are coming in as MGM Mirage—which acquired the property when it bought the Mandalay Resort Group in 2005—looks to transform the property from overflow accommodations for the Mandalay Bay into a destination in-and-of itself.
Luxor President Felix Rappaport is leading the way as the property undergoes this transformation. Rappaport recently met with Casino Connection Publisher Roger Gros about the changes at the Luxor.
One of your last jobs before coming here was as president of New York-New York, another highly-themed property. When you first arrived at the Luxor, was your intention to deemphasize the Egyptian theme, or was that the result of focus groups or other factors?
Rappaport: I think that we always realized at New York-New York that part of the appeal of the property was that it was a fairly faithful reproduction of New York city in the 1940s. Luxor was a property that, in my opinion, was brilliantly conceived when it opened back in 1993—I happened to be opening Treasure Island at the same time, another themed property.
But while Luxor had been successful for years, we felt that the property hadn’t evolved properly. Even though it had great employees and was very successful, we felt that the newer properties were competing with it to the detriment of Luxor and we really felt it needed an infusion of new venues and new attractions. It really had been run in recent years almost as an adjunct to Mandalay Bay, which has this huge convention center. Here’s 4,406 rooms. It’s a great place to house people but the food and beverage options, the gaming and the entertainment had been deemphasized. It seemed to us that keeping the theme where it made sense, was the way to go, and deemphasizing it where it had almost become trite.
Are you keeping some of the Egyptian them?. You have the iconic pyramid, but are you going to have the Sphinx out front and the Egyptian statues inside?
Obviously, a pyrmid is a pyramid is a pyramid. The good news is that even though it has a specific time and place in ancient Egypt, we felt that the pyramid always promised this fantastic property, but when you got inside, it didn’t deliver on that promise to some degree.
At this point, we have no plans to get rid of the Sphinx, we have no plans to get rid of the obelisk, and obviously, the pyramid will remain. I like the entrance, quite frankly, there are some monumental statues. But, for example, when you walk in now, we have a video wall, we have a car that is part of a promotion we’re doing and we have sound and lights and music.
When we got here, the statues were there, but you felt like you were entering the British Museum in London. It just felt a little too static, and the reality is we’re in the gaming, entertainment and hospitality business, and we have things to sell and things to promote. We like to think we’re keeping the best of the best, but we also feel when we open a new bar or restaurant, we don’t have to stick to that Egyptian theme.
The Luxor is still an icon of the Las Vegas Strip. What is your plan to not only attract people to the property, but also to keep them here?
The three words we use—after much market research—are: intriguing, approachable and fun. For anything we do, we like to run it by that criteria.
Is it intriguing? Does it capture the imagination?
Is it approachable? We don’t want to be off-putting, overly formal or static.
And is it fun? We’re not trying to be the next grand property in town—there are some great properties like that including our Bellagio. We want to be fun.
That’s the approach we’re taking.
When the Luxor opened, Las Vegas was in the amusement park era. There were rides at MGM, and there was a ride here too, a water ride?
There used to be a Nile River ride. It was a clever idea, but probably ill-conceived, because they thought that people would get in this ride then go to the front desk and check in. Well, when you get off of a plane after flying in from the East Coast, you don’t want to necessarily prolong the check-in process. At the end of the day, 1993 in Las Vegas years might as well be 50 years ago. Things go so fast here.
When I opened Treasure Island, everybody was worried that they were going to run out of high rollers, so they started going after the families. People viewed Vegas as a variation of Disney World, almost. With MGM, Luxor and Treasure Island, all three operators realized pretty fast that gambling, and an overt marketing approach to families didn’t mix. MGM has now moved in a totally different direction, Treasure Island is now TI, and we’re trying to take Luxor in that direction.
As you reposition the property looking for an expansion of your market, are you looking to tap into any specific niche in the market?
Some people think because we’re going to some hipper, newer things, that we’re trying to be the Hard Rock or Palms. Both of those properties are smaller, they’re both very successful, and they’ve carved out a nice niche market for themselves. Our challenge is a little more substantial. We’re 4,406 rooms, we’re right on the Strip, and we need to be a lot of things to a lot of people. This property on the weekends is already skewed younger, while Sunday through Thursday we still have, depending on the convention at Mandalay Bay, an older and more diverse population. I think we’re trying to have the best of both worlds.
We’re trying to augment what we have here to appeal to and capture the younger market on weekends, the hipper market, and I think certainly that Sunday through Thursday we’ll have a major portion of the convention business as well. We can’t afford to back ourselves into a corner.
I’m very interested in this ultra lounge situation. There seem to be so many of them, and you’ve already got two of them in this property. You have Noir Bar and LAX, and you’ve got plans for CatHouse. Give us your philosophy on these venues and why you brought in outside management companies to run these clubs.
There are a number of reasons we brought in outside people. First, the nightclub business is a sub-business and a specialty that very few people do well. My opinion is the great nightclub operators, in this case Robert Fry and Steve Davidovich of Pure Management Group, they’re better at nightclubs than we are. They have better promoters, they have the celebrity contacts and they have the infrastructure that supports great operations.
So we feel LAX, as the newest, perhaps the most expensive nightclub in town, has already, in two weeks, established itself as the best game in town and certainly one of the best nightclubs in the world. LAX, in my opinion—when we’re talking about attractions, we’re talking about making the property stickier, when we’re talking about buzz, when we’re talking about celebrity presence—has solved a lot of problems.
Noir Bar is really a celebrity hangout within LAX. That was something Robert and Steve evolved as they made plans because they realized people like Paris and Nicky Hilton, George Clooney, P.Diddy and Christina Aguilera, all of whom have been here in the past couple weeks, they don’t mind hanging out in the big nightclub for a while, but eventually they want to have a quite drink and fun with their entourage or their party.
CatHouse is a totally different set of operators and a different idea. I look at LAX as our version of MGM Grand’s Studio 54, and CatHouse as our version of Taboo, and, in my opinion, they will be complimentary.
Are the clubs a pure play for non-gaming revenue, or is there some spillover into the casino there?
When LAX opened, the casino was packed. Our employees were elated because in the past several years we’ve been putting up construction walls and planning new venues.
When you walked around the property there wasn’t a table to be had. There weren’t too many slot machines and there weren’t too many video poker machines to be had. It energized the whole property. So, it certainly has had an impact on crowd flow and attention, and our numbers were up. That will increase as we find ways to cross promote.
We all know you can have the best amenities and the best facilities in the world, but if your employees aren’t behind you 100 percent, it’s not going to work. What do you do to motivate them to get them to provide the level of service for which MGM Mirage is famous?
First of all, I believe that the service equation begins with employees. Happy employees provide great service, which brings the customers back, leading to a profitable property. Here, out of approximately 4,200 employees, half of them are day-one employees, so they’ve been here 14 years, and many of them go back as far as 25 years with Circus-Circus.
My philosophy is to be on a first-name basis and accessible to the employees. Every Friday I meet with about 25 employees, we call it “Rapping with Rappaport.” I hate the name, but I love the concept. The concept is that they can ask me anything. It creates a very valuable dialogue because they need to be part of the program. We can’t do it without them. They’re the front-line people.
My philosophy is to treat everyone the same. And at the end of the day, we want to communicate with out employees and we want to recognize our employees. We want them to be enthusiastic, we want them to feel that they’re stakeholders.
I’m never happy unless anywhere I work is one of the best places in town to work, and that’s my philosophy.
Roger Gros is publisher of Casino Connection and editor and publisher of Global Gaming Business magazine, the industry’s leading gaming trade publication. Prior to joining Global Gaming Business, Gros was president of Inlet Communications, an independent consulting firm. He was vice president of Casino Journal Publishing Group from 1984-2000, and held virtually every editorial title during his tenure. Gros was editor of Casino Journal, the National Gaming Summary and the Atlantic City Insider, and was the founding editor of Casino Player magazine. He was a co-founder of the American Gaming Summit and the Southern Gaming Summit conferences and trade shows. He is the author of the best-selling book, How to Win at Casino Gambling (Carlton Books, 1995), now in its third edition. Gros was named “Businessman of the Year” for 1998 by the Greater Atlantic City Chamber of Commerce.
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