World Tourism Blog

The first new hotel opened at the CityCenter development on the Las Vegas Strip. Vdara, a hotel with nearly 1,500 rooms, was unveiled to the public on Tuesday, and is the first property of the $8.5 billion CityCenter project to open.

The unveiling Tuesday of the nearly 1,500-room Vdara hotel marks the start of a phased opening of the $8.5 billion project built by development partners MGM Mirage and Dubai World.

The Crystals retail shopping mall opens Thursday. The 392-room Mandarin Oriental opens Saturday. The centerpiece Aria hotel-casino opens Dec. 16 with about 4,000 rooms.

Vdara is a 57-story, non-gambling, nonsmoking condominium hotel connected with other CityCenter features and the plush fountain-front Bellagio hotel next door. Bellagio is also owned by MGM Mirage.

Dubai World is the investment arm of the Dubai government. Hard money training.

While much has been made of CityCenter’s difficult birth, far less attention has been paid to the design behind it. It’s a design that speaks in equal parts to the challenges of the Las Vegas Strip, the unsustainable sprawl of the Las Vegas Valley (now home to 2 million people) and a fundamental shift in American demographics.

“After 30 years of suburban flight, people are moving back into the urban core,” says Billy Vassiliadis, CEO of R&R Partners (the ad agency behind the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” campaign). “You see it in Boston and Chicago, and we’re going to see more of it in Las Vegas. People are increasingly interested in living in a place where everything they want — shopping, restaurants, entertainment — is nearby.”

And residents aren’t the only ones who will benefit from the shift to a higher-density, more pedestrian-friendly Las Vegas.

“We’ve grown so big recently that moving around has become a burden,” says Vassiliadis, who believes CityCenter represents the beginning of a trend toward more destinations within a destination: “Las Vegas is going to evolve into something like Paris [the one in France, not the one up the street] where you spend one day in one arrondissement and go to another the next day.”

“CityCenter is Las Vegas entering the 21st century,” agrees Christopher Leinberger, a professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s fundamentally different than anything else that’s been built in Las Vegas before — modern, high-density, mixed-use — but it’s following the lead of metropolitan areas around the country.” Hard money training