Paul Szydelko
Circa Resort & Casino is expanding its inventory in its tower in downtown Las Vegas by 106 rooms and suites starting in late October, increasing its inventory by 20%.
When Circa opened in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, it intentionally left four floors in the middle as shells until the owners could better understand their customers’ desires. The expansions, four sunset suites and 102 single king rooms, which are being completed floor by floor every two weeks, bring the resort’s room inventory to 618.
I interviewed Derek Stevens, CEO of Circa, on August 20 to gain more insight into the strategy. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity:
Q: Why didn’t you use the maximum space capacity when you opened?
A: When you develop a new product, you just don’t know exactly how it’s going to work and run. We focused on a certain number of suites. We need a certain percentage of double rooms. We need a certain percentage of guest rooms. We made our estimates without having good data. We knew we didn’t have enough suites at (sister hotel) The D, so we decided to get more suites at this higher-end hotel.
Derek Stevens, CEO of Circa Resort & Casino, with “Vegas Vickie,” the iconic neon cowgirl who now resides in the resort’s lobby. Photo credit: Circa Resort & Casino
We thought (also) that more customers would want or request a refrigerator. Vegas was becoming more of a culinary destination and more people were traveling with medications that needed to be refrigerated. So we thought, OK, let’s focus on making sure every room has a refrigerator. And then we focus on the fact that people are getting bigger; we don’t put in queen beds. Every bed is a king. And about 25% of our rooms are flexible, you can quickly convert them from a room with a king bed and a couch to a room with two king beds.
So we had to allow enough time for the market and our customer base to tell us what we needed to do next. We had to gather more data to know how we wanted to design the rest of the hotel. And whether you had an unlimited budget or not, you can’t deny that it saved you a lot of money on the initial build-out!
Q: Why is now the right time?
A: We opened in 2020 in the middle of Covid. 2021 and 2022 (didn’t reflect) what we see as the long-term in Las Vegas because (they) were a little different in terms of tourism and consumer spending and so on. By the time we got to mid-2023, we felt like we had enough data to make a decision to move forward.
Q: When you opened, it was easy to remember the number of 777 rooms.
A: That’s not what we opened with. That was our application for our permit a few years before we opened Circa. That would have been Circa if we had made the entire property 100% standard rooms. So we’ll never get to 777. We opened with 512 and the expansion will bring us to 618.
Q: Are there any changes to the room layout?
A: The layout of the rooms is really good. The biggest thing we messed up was that when we opened we thought we would have a ton of outlets, but there weren’t enough. We’re going to open all of these new rooms with even more outlets than we had before.
Q: How did Circa’s adults-only policy influence the business decision?
A: We felt it was worth giving up some business in exchange for better customer service. We also felt it would give us a little bit of a leg up on the competition.
For me, it’s tough. I have my kids — my daughter is 26, my son is 28. Let’s say I go out to dinner with them and we stop at a bar or a club or play a little blackjack. It’s frustrating. My daughter might have to pull out her ID 30 times in one night. You see how much time all the cocktails, blackjack dealers and bartenders waste. By asking everyone for their ID when they come in, we can really focus on customer service. We don’t have to mess around and ask all these people for their ID. If you’re doing a hen party with eight girls, it takes say 30 seconds per person, that’s four minutes of standing around waiting to check IDs.
The over-21 rule doesn’t apply to all hotels, of course. But it works well for us. With a smaller number of hotel rooms, it makes a lot of sense. If we had 5,000 hotel rooms, I don’t think we could afford to give up the whole family business.
