Wow – This is sad to hear. You are spot on about the lack of marketing leading to this failure. Here is the sad part – Fontainbleau had/has rich marketing roots to draw from. The Miami property is legendary. I went to the Miami property 7-8 years ago and it is beautiful. Seemed like it was one of those places to see and be seen at. Think I also read back in the day Steve Wynn proposed to Elaine at the Miami property. The Las Vegas property could have leveraged the name, reputation and history of the Miami property to market the hotel/casino. They could have had an ad campaign starting out talking about the Miami resort and how the class of Miami will be arriving in Las Vegas and tie that in with the whole bow tie motif. Also – Zero social media was a horrible idea. However, you would be surprised at how many non-casino businesses fail to use social media. The cost of social media, relatively speaking, is a bargain yet people and businesses fail to use it, or at least use it effectively. Another mistake – no tie in with any major hotel chains – Hilton, Marriott, Acor, Holiday Inn. Nothing. The thing that is so confusing is FontainBleu paid big money for the best of the best executive talent picked from places like Wynn. What happened? Were these execs brought on borad and then micro-managed? Would be interesting to see the governance structure between FontainBleu and Koch Realestate and if they have outside loans.
Hotel/Resort/Casino operations architecture has changed since back in the day. These days the operators, like Caesars and MGM, don’t want to own anything. They just want to operate. They have sold the assets, lease them back, and just operate. Personally, I don’t understand the logic in this. Eventually they are going to give back all that money they got from selling the asset to keep leasing it and they (the operator).
The old casino ops model, where gaming companies purchased land built casinos and operated them is largely over. These days about two REITs own all the strip land and buildings. If FontainBleu defaults I wonder if the days of someone like Carl Ican picking up cheap properties will come to an end? Will some partnership between one of the REITs and an operator come in and buy FontainBleu?
Hopefully FontainBleu is able to pull it together and figure things out . Major resorts like FontainBleu employee thousands of average people who use that money to support themselves and their families. Crossing my fingers for them.
]]>