Las Vegas Strip Shutting Down: “Hotel Occupancy Will Be In Low Teens” MGM Says

If anyone at this point could possibly still have any doubts the proverbial shit has hit the fan, mass closures and billions lost has come to a place which never shutters day or night:

GM Resorts International announced Sunday it is temporarily suspending operations at all Las Vegas properties “until further notice” effective Tuesday.

Casino operations are set to close Monday, followed by hotel operations. The company will not be taking reservations prior to May  1.

This means closure of Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, The Mirage, Luxor, New York-New York, Excalibur, and Park MGM, among others. Wynn Resorts also announced closure of its two luxury-hotel casinos for at least two weeks. This includes all nightclubs, day clubs, spas, salons and gyms on these properties, after by end of last week some properties began taking temperature checks of patrons entering.

Currently there at least two confirmed cases of MGM employees with COVID-19: one at Luxor and another at Wet Republic pool, with 26 confirmed cases in Nevada as of late Sunday. This after a guest reportedly attending a convention at MGM’s Mirage tested positive last week, which may have further infected several employees.

“It is now apparent that this is a public health crisis that requires major collective action if we are to slow its progression,” MGM Chairman and CEO Jim Murren said.

“We will plan to reopen our resorts as soon as it (is) safe to do so and we will continue to support our employees, guests, and communities in every way that we can during this period of closure,” Murren added.

While salaried employees “should expect to continue working until further notice,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal writes based on a Sunday letter addressed to MGM employees it obtained, many thousands if not tens of thousands of other full-time employees are expected to be furloughed or laid off.

The letter details plans to pay any of those laid off “two weeks from their last day of work, and all employees on the company’s health plan will maintain benefits through June 30,” according to the Review-Journal. Unions are reportedly negotiating.

This is unreal. When I ran the military bomb squad in Las Vegas, we had special procedures for dealing with an IED on the Strip because it was too expensive for the casinos to close for a single MINUTE. https://t.co/TnnqJZtgwp

— Brian Castner (@Brian_Castner) March 16, 2020

Wynn CEO Matt Maddox said his employees will get paid through the crisis and closures. “Based on what we’re seeing, our business volumes are going to be basically empty over the next few weeks,” Maddox said. 

“Our hotel occupancy will be in the low teens – and that, to me, is not our concern. What our concern is that we all get through this together.” He indicated further that employees won’t have to worry about pay. 

“What we’re going to do through these challenging times is make sure that all of our full-time employees – whether you’re in a closed outlet or you’re working here – will be getting their pay,” he added. “We don’t know where this is going to end, but we do know that it will.”

To give an idea of just how rare or more simply unprecedented and unheard of such a mass Vegas strip closure like this is, no doubt with billions of dollars at stake and fluttering out the window, consider the ominous words of Brian Castner, currently a weapons specialist with Amnesty International’s Crisis Team, and formerly a bomb squad chief in Las Vegas.

“This is unreal. When I ran the military bomb squad in Las Vegas, we had special procedures for dealing with an IED on the Strip because it was too expensive for the casinos to close for a single MINUTE,” the bomb disposal expert observed.

And we’ll just leave it right there.