Bally’s Tropicana Casino to Be Shut Down in Phases, New Name Determined

Bally’s Corporation Tropicana casino in Nevada is about to be closed, and the process will be conducted in phases, as the company informed the Nevada Gaming Control Board. The final closure is set for April 2. 

Final days of the popular casino:

The plans for a new casino resort which will be constructed along with the long-expected Oakland Athletics stadium remain in place. However, the name of the popular casino will be changed, so Tropicana won’t exist anymore. The company decided that the new resort would be named Bally’s Las Vegas.

Ameet Patel, the casino’s senior vice president and western region manager for Bally’s, said that the casino will close its door at 3 a.m. on April 2. After all guests are checked out, the food and beverage departments will be closed as well.

The slot machines from the casino will be either retired or transferred to other company’s casinos.

Patel commented: “We have several plans with the slot machines and gaming equipment, particularly because we have 15 other properties that would love to take the existing slot machines. So we are redistributing a lot of the gaming equipment to our sister properties. The ones that are obsolete, we will be putting them back on liquidation.”

The agents of the Nevada Gaming Control Board will oversee the closure.

The visitors are trying to make the most of the last Tropicana days, so the room rates are 3.5x higher than usual.

But even after the resort closes its doors, there is more work to do. Patel said: “Post-closing, we’ll have up to 90 days to have team members in various phases working to completely shut down the operation and decommission the buildings.” 

But one problem remains: the company hasn’t decided what to do with the multimillion-dollar stained-glass Tiffany glass canopy that is currently placed at the casino’s entrance.

Patel gave his opinion on this: “Yeah, we haven’t really made a decision on the stained glass. We do want to make sure we have some historic preservation. We are working with the Neon Museum right now for the Tropicana sign to be lit in there. So there are several agencies locally that we are working with to say what would be a good historical value to have.”

The fate of employees:

When it comes to current Tropicana employees, they’ll be transferred to other casinos, and Bally’s management is working hard to provide them with new jobs.

At the moment, the casino employs 700 people, who might find their chance at a few job fairs that will be organized in upcoming weeks. Some of them will find their positions once the new casino opens.

At the current Tropicana site, a new, impressive stadium will be constructed. It is expected that the stadium will cost $1,5 billion, and it will feature 33,000 seats. The new casino will be on the same property as the stadium, but according to Marcus Glover, an executive vice president and CFO, the stadium’s representatives and the owners of the land, Gaming & Leisure Properties Inc., still haven’t decided on how to incorporate the casino into the new property.

The work on it will begin in 2025, and it is expected for the construction to be finished in 2028.

For now, the interested parties are supposed to decide how to fit the stadium on the site.

As Las Vegas Review Journal reports, it is still unknown if the popular Tropicana would be sent off with the sparks, or through conventional means. However, Bally’s attorney Dan Reser claims that the flashy celebratory implosion would mean asking for environmental permits.