What we know, don’t know about the Mirage’s transition to Hard Rock

It’s been about a year since the Seminole Indian Tribe — owner of the Hard Rock International brand — bought the Mirage and longer since it announced plans to transform the iconic Strip property, but you wouldn’t notice any changes from Las Vegas Boulevard.

Avid Vegas watchers may have to wait longer for more visible changes. Hard Rock officials have stayed tight-lipped about how they plan to turn the Polynesian-themed property into a music-themed gambling mecca, letting plans come to the public through public development meetings and company town halls. Here’s what we know, and don’t know, about the Mirage’s transition to Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas.

What we know

Hard Rock acquired The Mirage’s operations from casino giant MGM Resorts International in December 2022 for more than $1 billion in cash. (But plans were announced a year before that.) Casino landlord Vici Properties owns The Mirage’s real estate and has said its lease with Hard Rock calls for initial annual rent of $90 million.

Hard Rock International officials want to change the Strip skyline with a guitar-shaped hotel tower. The 660–foot tall all-suite tower, with a podium below it, received planning approval from Clark County officials during a March 2023 meeting. The proposed tower is designed to resemble back-to-back guitars with “brightly lit strings” and would feature floor-to-ceiling glass panes, Hard Rock attorneys told county officials in planning documents at the time. The design resembles a similar, but smaller, guitar-shaped hotel tower in Florida.

The beloved volcano – still erupting for eager crowds – will be nixed once the new hotel tower plans are firmed up.

But that final vision isn’t expected for some time. When the project begins it’s expected to take as many as 30 months to complete. Hard Rock CEO Jim Allen said he hoped the project will open sometime in late 2027 or early 2028, according to a company town meeting held on May 25 in Atlantic City.

The new ownership also plans to build new casino areas, retail spaces, restaurants with outdoor seating, a nightclub and a day club, additional back of house areas and more, according to plans submitted to the county.

To build new outdoor spaces, officials will remove the existing Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. When asked about the demolition work beginning in the property’s southwest corner, where the animal habitat was, Mirage President Joe Lupo said in a statement: “We have simply begun preliminary activity for the transformation of the closed animal habitat areas, that have not been utilized for the last 6 months.”

They’ll also remove some existing pool structures to remodel more than 45,000 square feet of pool surface area.

Other indoor plans call for an expansion of the live theater and ballroom space and a low-rise expansion along the south side of the property.

Resort officials previously said when the resort expansion is complete, the casino will be enlarged from 94,000 square feet to 174,000 square feet while the convention space will grow from 200,000 square feet to 283,000 square feet. The theater will go from 3,278 theater seats to 6,265 and 18 food and beverage outlets to 21.

What we don’t know

We still don’t know when they want to break ground on the guitar-shaped tower. Company officials declined to comment further about how long the property will continue to operate as the Mirage and a spokesperson said the company was still designing and developing the construction plans.

Hard Rock officials have at least two more years to operate the Mirage brand royalty-free, according to the three-year brand agreement announced during the deal.

What remains unknown is just how Hard Rock chooses to execute its plans. Brendan Bussmann, an industry analyst and founder of Las Vegas-based B Global, said project management is likely the complicating factor.

“Construction becomes very much like a ballet – trying to navigate that and get timing of delivering of steel and concrete, all those things in place as you want to keep a road open, keep your porte-cochere going and things like that,” Bussmann said. “It’s difficult to do.”

Other properties on the Strip have undergone rebrands in recent years. Most recently, Caesars Entertainment transformed Bally’s into Horseshoe Las Vegas in a renovation that was completed in December 2022. MGM Resorts International, meanwhile, renovated the former Monte Carlo into its new look, Park MGM, over roughly a year and a half with the brand’s official relaunch occurring in May 2018.

Expect Hard Rock’s transition to be more challenging, Bussmann said. Resort officials won’t fully close the property during the rebrand, meaning the construction schedule will have to align with the best opportunities to take hotel floors offline or to change the ingress and egress once new building begins.

“It’s one that’s gonna take some more ingenuity in figuring out how to keep the trains running while building a new station,” he said.

McKenna Ross is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Contact her at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on X.