Henderson: Hyatt tops off Lake Las Vegas resort

Gary Thompson

Thursday, May 27, 1999 | 11:09 a.m.

The first hotel-casino at the $4.4 billion Lake Las Vegas residential and resort development is on schedule for a mid-December opening, executives said Wednesday.

The $150 million-plus Hyatt Regency Lake Las Vegas Resort hasn't yet matched the publicity and won't ever match the size of most other new hotel-casinos opening in Southern Nevada during the current wave of resort expansion.

But it outdoes them all in its natural setting. The 496-room property is built on 21 acres of lakefront property surrounded by a gorgeous Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course that weaves through the mountainous terrain separating Henderson from Lake Mead.

The resort marks the Las Vegas market debut for Hyatt Hotels Corp., which operates 188 upscale hotels worldwide that are noted for incorporating local environments and cultures into their themes.

"We were skeptical about coming into the Las Vegas market at first," Hyatt Divisional Vice President Victor Lopez said during a topping-off ceremony at the resort Wednesday.

"But John Scovell called to tell us about the site. I came out here to see it and just fell in love with it," Lopez said.

Scovell is an executive with Woodbine Development Corp., one of four partners involved in the Hyatt project. Dallas-based Woodbine is a real estate developer specializing in master-planned communities, resorts and corporate services.

The other partners include Transcontinental Properties, which is owned by Texas billionaires Sid and Lee Bass and is developing the 2,245-acre Lake Las Vegas master-planned community; and Cook Inlet Region Inc. (CIRI), one of 13 regional corporations established by Congress to help native Alaskans invest proceeds from oil and other natural resource recoveries on their lands.

Lopez said the site, nestled in a hillside rising along the north shore of the 325-acre man-made lake, "is a beautiful setting for a destination resort with proximity to Las Vegas."

"We believe there's a big market for a destination that combines the peaceful and serene setting of Lake Las Vegas with its proximity to the Strip," Lopez said.

The executive has seen a big change in resort customers during his 24 years with Hyatt.

"Today's customers are much more sophisticated, knowledgeables and demanding," he said. "They're looking for activity that provides spiritual, physical and educational enrichment, not just relaxation."

To accommodate those needs, he said, Hyatt tries to "bring as much of the destination into the resort as possible."

Its noted Camp Hyatt program, started a decade ago to care for the children of adult Hyatt guests, was one of the lodging industry's first such efforts. Now the program, which uses trained counselors to help guests learn about the culture and cuisine indigenous to the resort's locale, has become a learning experience for parents and children alike, Lopez said.

Much of Hyatt Regency's marketing will be targeted at capturing so-called incentive business, where corporations award luxury vacations to valued employees. And the marketing of the intimate golf-and-gambling resort just a drive and long iron from the bustle of Las Vegas proper is already paying dividends.

"We have more advance business on the books at this stage of our development than at another other resort in Hyatt history," Lopez said.

In addition to upscale rooms and suites, the Hyatt Regency will offer a European-style casino with table games and slots, live entertainment, a spa and fitness center, three restaurants, 40,000 square feet of meeting space and other destination-resort amenities.

It will also offer some of the most spectacular views of natural settings available from any resort in Southern Nevada. Guests looking south from the Hyatt will see scores of glittering, multi-million-dollar private homes terraced into the hillsides on the other side of the lake, while the resort itself is surrounded by the Reflection Bay golf course that climbs from the shoreline into the mountains north of the hotel.

The Hyatt Regency is to be the first of several resort hotels planned for the Lake Las Vegas development. Ultimately, Transcontinental executives plan to have five to six resorts and more than 4,000 upscale homes built at Lake Las Vegas.