Paul Szydelko
Circa Resort & Casino is adding 106 rooms and suites, a 20% increase to its inventory, in its tower in downtown Las Vegas beginning in late October.
When Circa opened in the throes of the pandemic in 2020, it purposefully left four floors in the middle as shells until its owners could better understand its customer demands. The additions, four Sunset Suites and 102 single-king rooms, to be rolled out floor by floor every two weeks, bring the resort's room inventory to 618.
I interviewed Derek Stevens, Circa's CEO, on Aug. 20 to gain more insight on the strategy. The conversation was edited for clarity and brevity:
Q: Why did you not build out the maximum room capacity when you opened?
A: When you develop a new product, you just don't know exactly how it's going to work, how it's going to run. We focused in on X amount of suites. We need X percentage of rooms with two beds. We need X percentage of rooms of hospitality. We took our best guesses without having great data. We knew at [sister property] The D, we were very undersuited, so we said we should get more suites at this higher-end property.
Circa Resort & Casino's CEO Derek Stevens with "Vegas Vickie," the iconic neon cowgirl that now resides in the resort's lobby Photo Credit: Circa Resort & Casino
We [also] really thought that more customers want or demand a refrigerator. Vegas became more of a culinary destination, and more and more people travel with medication that needs to be refrigerated. So we felt, OK, let's focus on every room having refrigeration. Then let's focus in on the fact that people are getting bigger; let's not have any queen beds. Every bed is a king-size bed. And we have about 25% of our rooms that are flexible, that can be quickly transitioned from a room with one king and a couch to a room with two kings.
So we had to allow enough time to go by to allow the market and our customer base to tell us what we needed to do for the next step. We needed to get more data to know how we wanted to fill in the rest of the hotel. And, whether you had an unlimited budget or not, you can't deny the fact that it saved a lot of money on the initial buildout!
Q: Why is now the right time?
A: We opened in the middle of Covid in 2020. The years 2021 and 2022 [didn't reflect] what we consider to be the long term in Las Vegas because [they] were a little bit different when it came to tourism and consumer spending and whatnot. By the time we got to the middle of 2023, we felt that we had enough data to make a determination to move forward.
Q: A 777-room count was easy to remember when you opened.
A: That's not what we opened with. That's what our application was on our permit a few years before Circa ever opened. That's what Circa would have been if we would have done 100% standard rooms in the whole property. So we'll never get to 777. We opened with 512, and this addition gets us to 618.
Q: Any tweaks to the rooms' floor plans?
A: The room design worked out really well. One thing we screwed up the most is we thought we had a ton of electrical outlets when we opened, and yet we didn't have enough. We're going to open all these new rooms with even more electrical outlets than what we've had previously.
Q: How did Circa's adults-only policy factor into the business decision?
A: We felt that it was worth giving up some business in return for a higher element of customer service. We also felt that it would differentiate us a bit.
It's tough for me. I have my kids -- my daughter's 26, son's 28; let's say I go out with them for dinner, and we stop at a bar or club or we go play a little blackjack. It's frustrating. My daughter may have to pull out her ID 30 times in a given night. You start looking at how much time is wasted by all the cocktailers and the blackjack dealers and the bartenders. By IDing everyone as they enter, that allows us to really focus in on customer service. You're not messing around asking for the ID of all these people. If you have an eight-girl bachelorette party, let's say it takes 30 seconds per person, that's four minutes you're standing around waiting to verify IDs.
The over-21 policy is not for every property, that's for sure. But for us, it works out well. With a smaller number of hotel rooms, it makes a lot of sense to do this. If we had 5,000 hotel rooms, I don't know that we would be able to afford giving up all this family business.