Tech leads the way at CityCenter’s new ARIA Resort & Casino in Las Vegas

Think of it as “Five Star Wars: The Next Generation.”

In the battle for luxury hotel supremacy in Las Vegas, the 4,004-room ARIA Resort & Casino, set to make its debut in late 2009 in Vegas’ new CityCenter, will use ultramodern technology as one of its fun guns.

When a guest enters the room of the high-end hotel, the lights come up and the curtains draping the floor-to-ceiling windows will part. At checkout, the lights are turned off, and the heating or cooling ramps down to a more energy-efficient level.

A 42-inch LCD TV in each room (they are more than 530 square feet) is the command center, allowing guests to adjust lights or temperature, play music and video, arrange wake-up calls, get messages and more, all handled by a remote that the chief operating officer promises will be easy to use. This is not, he insists, the Bellagio for geeks — well-to-do ones, we might add.

An early iteration of the remote had 50 buttons, said Bill McBeath, of ARIA Resort & Casino. But, he said, “we wanted it to be non-techie-proof so anyone could navigate through the system without any assistance.” The simplified remote has a joystick and a minimal number of buttons, he said. “We didn’t want it to be intimidating.”

That’s all well and good, but what if the remote goes dead, as it invariably seems to in a hotel?

Not going to happen, they say.

The room is so high-tech that the remote signals that it needs new batteries, and someone will attend to its needs.

Technology isn’t the only thing the 61-story ARIA has going for it. In Sin City, where high-stakes games sometimes rely on mind games, this hotel, designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli architects (you know that name from the Renee and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa), will have something unusual: natural light.

Besides the floor-to-ceiling windows in guest rooms, the lobby will have a large skylight and the hallways will have natural light. “We’ve broken through a lot of those old casino paradigms,” McBeath said. “We’re not afraid of light. We want people to feel comfortable.”

The hotel and casino also is pursuing LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) designation, based on its green qualities.

Other CityCenter lodgings (the 400-room Mandarin Oriental, the 207-unit Harmon Hotel Spa & Residences) will have the same technology as ARIA. (The 1,543-unit Vdara Condo Hotel and the residences in the Veer Towers will not). Other features of the $9-billion mixed-use CityCenter, which will be between the Bellagio and the Monte Carlo on 67 acres, include half a million square feet of entertainment and retail and about $40 million in public art. The development is a joint venture between MGM Mirage and Dubai World, an investment company of that country’s government.

— Catharine Hamm/Times Travel editor

[Photo: CityCenter Land LLC]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 3:24 pm by Catharine Hamm and is filed under Las Vegas, Luxury Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.