What’s in a name? That’s the question confronting Glenn Straub, for whom the days are counting down until he can reopen the hotel portion of his casino with a new name. We 
don’t agree that Revel is a meaningless word, but finding a name that can build brand equity from scratch is no easy task. Whoever thought “Borgata” would resonate and “Revel” would land with a thud? Straub promises to reopen June 15 with 500 hotel rooms and all the original restaurants, which may mean he’s come to terms with those tenants he was trying so hard to drive from the premises. In a symbolic form of rebirth, that weird ball atop Revel (whose origin is chronicled here) was lit up the other night, as Straub tests the fitness of Revel’s infrastructure for reopening.
While we think Atlantic City has as many casinos as it needs (the numbers speak for themselves), the New Jersey Legislature is nonetheless to be commending for trying to rethink — again — the boutique-casino law and rewrite it into a form that makes opening such a business on the Boardwalk affordable. In its present form, the mini-casinos would have to be built from the ground up, a prohibitively expensive proposition. It’s far cheaper to buy an existing casino. Chelsea Hotel owner Curtis Bashaw might finally get into the casino business if the Lege passes the bill (two previous efforts languished), although Hard Rock International appears to have soured on Atlantic City altogether. “It never happened, unfortunately. But we keep trying, and we’re going to keep trying,” said state Sen. Paul Sarlo (D). One of the Chris Christie (R) administration’s efforts to jump-start Atlantic City, the original boutique-casino bill was a good idea badly executed. Let’s hope they get it right this time.
* Hard Rock International is thinking a lot bigger than Atlantic City these days. In a joint venture with Banyan Tree, it will be developing a casino in Vietnam. It’s also planning no fewer than three hotels in China, in the cities of Shenzhen, Dalian and Haikou. “With the Chinese travel industry quickly changing as leisure demand grows, we feel the music-centric programming at Hard Rock Hotels will resonate well with 
Chinese travelers who visit Dalian each year,” Hard Rock executive Leong Wy Joon told Bloomberg. It’s part of a five-year plan, to be executed in tandem with state-owned Luneng Real Estate Group. Hard Rock isn’t stopping at those first three cities. It would eventually expand into tourist destinations (Lijiang), secondary cities (Wuhan), and the great metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai. And those are just a few of the market’s on Hard Rock’s Chinese wish list. But … “We won’t go in too fast. If we expand too fast, we risk hurting our brand, and unlike hotels, we only have one brand,” Joon said. Hard Rock is also queuing up for a casino-hotel in Japan, though it had better be prepared for a long wait, given the ongoing paralysis of the Nipponese government where gambling is concerned. “Japan is the next Macao,” said a Hard Rock exec, but you’ll have to pardon our skepticism, given the Shinzo Abe administration’s years of do-nothing policymaking where casinos are concerned.
* The other Hard Rock brand, the west-of-the-Mississippi territory managed by Warner Gaming, isn’t doing so badly with its recent venture into Iowa:
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* Slot routes continue to make their presence felt on Illinois riverboat casinos, entering their tenth straight year of revenue decline. Boyd Gaming will be closing Par-A-Dice two hours earlier, five days a week. “This is all about the ongoing impact that video gaming has had on our business in the last three years. You’ve got 4,000 video machines in the Peoria area. That’s the equivalent of being in direct competition with three Par-A-Dice-sized casinos,” said Boyd spokesman David Strow. Earlier, Par-A-Dice had laid off 40 employees, in a yet another concession to the inroads made by video gaming.
