Caesars Kicks Off $375M Conference Center Project in Vegas
The 550,000-square-foot facility will include the two largest pillarless ballrooms in the world, as well as Nevada’s first 100,000-square-foot outdoor event space.
By Keith Loria
Caesars Entertainment Corp. has broken ground on the $375 million Caesars Forum, a 550,000-square-foot conference center in Las Vegas, the first of this size to be constructed on just one level. The property is slated for delivery by 2020.
When completed, the venue will boast the two largest 110,000-square-foot pillarless ballrooms in the world at a scale of which would equal 27 tennis courts. In all, the property is set to feature 300,000 square feet of flexible meeting space, including two 40,000 square-foot ballrooms and six boardrooms. The property has been designed for LEED Silver certification.
“It’s a really unique basket of goods that Las Vegas, and specifically the Forum have, that no one else can replicate,” Michael Massari, Caesars Entertainment’s chief sales officer, told Commercial Property Executive. “You start right from the airport, which is 3 miles from the facility, and is accessible to all the major markets in the U.S., and you get to the facility and find the two largest ballrooms ever built.”
The property will also be home to Forum Plaza, a 100,000-square-foot outdoor meeting and event space—the first of its kind in Sin City. The space will offer planners a way to host receptions, meetings and live entertainment utilizing the famed Las Vegas Strip as a backdrop.
“There’s nothing like it anywhere,” Massari said. “The size is reflective of what’s happening in American companies and meetings, which are both getting much larger. General sessions for 4,000 people were rare 10 years ago but they are quite common now and it’s not uncommon to have general sessions for 20,000 people.”
The new conference center will be nearby eight of Caesars Entertainment’s Las Vegas properties containing more than 20,000 hotel rooms, and is directly adjacent to the popular LINQ Promenade retail district. It will have direct access via a skybridge to Harrah’s Las Vegas and The LINQ Hotel and Casino, and will be connected to the LINQ Promenade and Flamingo Las Vegas by a skybridge.
An entertainment conglomerate
Caesars Entertainment has 40 first-class properties in its portfolio nationwide offering more than 2.1 million square feet of meeting and event space. In 2017 alone, Caesars Entertainment hosted more than 1.9 million meeting participants at 17,300 meetings and events, cementing itself as one of the leader in the meeting and event industry.
The American School Counselor Association has already signed on as Caesars Forum’s first booking for July 2021. For that meeting, 3,500 attendees are expected to converge to the facility from around the nation. The Company has already contracted more than $70 million in conference business for Caesars Forum going forward.
Caesars Entertainment also recently broke ground on a new $200 million conference center at Harrah’s Cherokee in Cherokee, N.C.
In December, Caesars Entertainment Corp. and its spinoff “experiential asset” REIT, VICI Properties Inc., have completed their sale-leaseback of the real estate assets associated with Harrah’s Las Vegas Hotel and Casino.
This spring, the company announced it would bring the Caesars brand to two hotels in Dubai’s Jumeirah Beach region and to the Puerto Los Cabos region in Mexico.
Images courtesy of Caesars Entertainment
