Last week I received a WhatsApp message from a contact in the industry to alert me that Accor had entered the Las Vegas market.
The French company announced a deal to operate the 2,884-room Treasure Island hotel-casino, which soon will be rebranded as the Treasure Island-TI Las Vegas Hotel & Casino, Handwritten Collection.
Looking into the nitty gritty of the deal showed me that I have largely forgotten the players, hotels, room count, performance metrics, deals and changes in Sin City. Las Vegas is a market I used to know like the back of my hand when I covered gaming beats for several magazines when I lived and worked in the U.S.
Now I have been back in England for more than a decade, the swift alterations to the ever-changing Las Vegas Strip are news bullet points that occasionally I register but mostly leave in the very capable hands of my Cleveland-based CoStar News Hotels’ colleagues.
The agreement seems to be one that is radically different for Accor. I assume there was some notion of this when the brand negotiated and chosen for Treasure Island was Handwritten Collection, one of Accor's soft brands.
Evidently, the famous hotel stands on its own two feet and thus would want to retain a degree of marketing independence, while benefitting from Accor’s global distribution.
Treasure Island increased Accor’s room count in the Americas — it is strong in Brazil — by a notable 4%. The Las Vegas property will be the second Handwritten hotel in the U.S., joining the 95-room Hotel Stratford San Francisco-Handwritten Collection.
Treasure Island once offered me employment. That must have been in 2000, or thereabouts, during a stay at the hotel with other industry journalists.
One evening, my group was invited to an area within the spectacular lights show the hotel put on at that time on property. The “Battle of Buccaneer Bay” show ended on July 6, 2003.
In summary, the show chronicled the repelling of a British attack by American buccaneers. The Americans of course came out victorious, although it was a balanced thing for a while thanks to the need to create a little tension and suspense.
The U.S. heroes were exhausted but not so much they could not come and say hello to us after the show. Their leader, seeing my style, or perhaps lack of it, offered me a job on the spot in case anyone of his cohorts was captured and could not turn up to perform the next evening.
Back in 2000, my hair went halfway down my back and my tattoos were on display due to the heat of a Las Vegas summer, where, normally, I would want to be professional and cover them.
You might need to go to the gym first, someone said to me.
I replied: “Thank you, there is a gym inside the hotel.” At that point the brave Americans became eerily silent.
There were looks exchanged and eyebrows raised. Hands inched down to their cutlasses.
“And, certainly, we’d have to test your loyalty first with that accent,” someone said.
Maybe in that moment, the job offer was rescinded?
Oh, what could have been, although I would have been placed before a firing squad a couple of years later when the pirate spectacular was replaced by show “Sirens of TI,” with a cast entirely of women.
I was born in Dartford, Kent, England, the same place as the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. Richards himself played Captain Teague, in two of the Johnny Depp's “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies in 2007 and 2011.
But this time, I got offered a role as a pirate first!
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