Big ideas often don’t arrive with just the snap of a finger. Take the latest big thing from the Seminole Tribe of Florida: a 450-foot-tall, guitar-shaped hotel on the tribe’s casino property in Hollywood, Florida.
Seminoles’ CEO James Allen said the idea for the hotel was actually hatched in 2006, during a chat with the Las Vegas architectural firm Klai Juba.
“We started the sentence with ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if…’” Allen said.
This Monday was a day to show off the Seminole muscle. The tribe hosted a “topping out” event, a tradition that pauses and lauds a project’s construction workers when they reach the point where there is no more upward building to go.
“We believe it becomes an attraction to people across the globe,” Allen said. “The reception to this design has been overwhelming,” to the point that three others are in the works, including one in Barcelona.
You can understand why the Seminoles are celebrating. The new hotel adds a total of 30 restaurants, lounges, and bars, including a rooftop bar; 21,000 square feet of retail space; a 41,000-square-foot spa; meeting and convention space, including an exhibition hall; and, notably, a new 6,500-seat entertainment venue that the Seminole Hard Rock officials say could host any of those award shows you see on network TV.
The new hotel also helps a property that’s been so slammed with guests from South Florida that it often barely advertises for business. The new hotel is thus likely to serve far more guests from afar.
“We’ve been sold out since Day One,” Allen said, of the existing 12-story hotel, which has 461 rooms. The new hotel will add 638 guest rooms and suites in the guitar-shaped tower, with another 168 in the pool tower, overlooking a private cabana area.
But the primary attraction is the architecture. The new hotel is designed to resemble back-to-back guitars, complete with guitar faces, partial necks, and brightly lit strings reaching 450 feet into the sky.
There’s also a 13.5-acre pool resort with three distinct waterfront areas. Options include a true beach-style experience created with locally sourced Florida sand, set with comfortable beach lounge chairs; a private, tropical lagoon-style setting amidst waterfalls and swaying palms; and a large water expanse, nearly as long as three football fields, that will offer water activities such as canoeing and paddle boarding. The exclusive private lagoon area, reminiscent of a Bora Bora ocean-scape, will be outfitted with bungalow-style cabanas offering personalized service and high-end amenities. A Day Club will complement evening fun with an adults-only, European-style sunbathing and swimming area. As they say, nowadays resorts that offer gambling are becoming less and less about that.
The new hotel is set to open in fall 2019, a little more than 15 years after the Seminole Hard Rock opened on the same property.
In between, Allen has guided the Seminole Tribe’s acquisition of Hard Rock International in March 2007, for $965 million, making the Seminoles the first North American Indian tribe to purchase a major international corporation. Through its Hard Rock International subsidiary, the Tribe controls one of the world’s most recognized restaurant, hotel, and casino brands, with venues in 75 countries, including 182 cafes, 24 hotels, and 11 casinos.
“No other brand has the worldwide presence that we have,” says Allen, who serves as Chairman of Hard Rock International. Another 30 hotels are in the pipeline, and about a dozen cafes are added annually.
Still, the Seminole casinos are doing just fine as an entity here in Florida, if one chooses to ignore all that worldwide expansion. The tribe collected about $2.4 billion in 2017 in gambling revenues, while beating back the threats of commercial hotel-resort casinos coming into the state. In November, voters will decide whether to mandate that all future gambling expansion require their approval – rather than just the state legislature’s; polling indicates that well more than the needed 60 percent of voters are in favor of the constitutional amendment.
Allen is detail-driven, but he has loved every step of this business explosion, to the point that he joked with reporters about the shape of that $1.5 billion project. When asked why the Seminoles chose a guitar for the shape, he answered, “Well, we can’t build a hotel shaped like a saxophone.”
