Luxury resort sets ground breaking at old Clarion site
The coronavirus pandemic may have shut off business travel to Las Vegas and other cities, but developer Lorenzo Doumani is betting big that this line of business will be up and running again.
Doumani announced Monday that he plans to break ground in July on Majestic Las Vegas, a 720-room luxury hotel off the north Strip. He expects to finish the roughly $850 million resort in 2024.
The project site — former home of the Clarion hotel, which Doumani imploded in 2015 — is across the street from the newly expanded Las Vegas Convention Center, and Doumani said his nongaming hotel will cater to business travelers.
“We’re not a typical leisure tourist destination at all,” he told the Review-Journal.
Majestic, 305 Convention Center Drive, is slated to include restaurants, live entertainment, a medical spa offering “executive physicals” and nutrition counseling, and 35 corporate suites spread among the tower’s top 10 floors.
The suites, which could be used for convention and showroom space and the like, are offered for sale and priced from $10 million to $100 million, a news release said.
Doumani, who is scheduled to hold a media event Wednesday to discuss the project, obtained Clark County approval of his plans in 2019 and had hoped to break ground last year. Then the pandemic hit, turning life upside down, devastating Las Vegas’ tourism-dependent economy and, Doumani said, delaying his plans by 15 to 18 months.
With coronavirus vaccines being rolled out, there is widespread hope that the pandemic’s end is in sight, and Doumani figures that the outbreak will be stamped out by the time he opens Majestic.
“I certainly hope so,” he said. “It would have to be.”
The pandemic has kept people home and away from crowds for fear of getting infected, putting the kibosh on corporate travel as business gatherings moved online to Zoom or other video chat sites.
Doumani said that he intends to focus his corporate-suite sales efforts on tech, entertainment, sports and fashion companies and that after the pandemic is over, people will still be “wary” of massive crowds.
At Majestic, he said, companies can have their own suites and control who comes in.
“I think people are going to very wary of large spaces,” he said.
Contact Eli Segall at esegall@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0342. Follow @eli_segall on Twitter.
