The Ultimate Escape
Undersea adventure, high-stakes gaming, world-class luxury and more await you at Atlantis
By Rob Wiser
Approximately 100 miles east of the Florida coast lie the Bahamas, a unique destination among the world’s great tropical getaways. With its rich history, romantic ambience, magnificent beaches and friendly, easygoing vibe, it has long been the preferred vacation spot for millions of Americans.
While the Bahamas offers the excitement of traveling abroad—it’s barely an hour flight from Miami or Fort Lauderdale—it contains many of the comforts and reassurances of home. Everyone here speaks English (though it’s spoken with a mix of colorful accents), and United States currency is accepted everywhere, tied at a 1-to-1 ratio to the Bahamian dollar.
What we refer to as “The Bahamas” actually consists of more than 700 small, coral-based islands and 2,000 cays. (Contrary to popular belief, The Bahamas isn’t technically a part of the Caribbean; it lies entirely in the Atlantic Ocean, just north of the Caribbean sweep of islands.) A colony during the era of British imperialism, it gained its independence in the mid-20th Century and rose to become one of the world’s most beloved tourist destinations.
In the eyes of many of these visitors, the crown jewel of the Bahamas is the wondrous Atlantis resort located on Paradise Island. Catch a flight into Nassau International Airport and you’re only a short taxi ride away from this breathtaking fantasyland, themed in the spirit of the legendary “lost continent” under the sea.
Imagine a gaming resort as stunning and meticulously detailed as Bellagio in Las Vegas, set it along one of the planet’s most beautiful beaches, and you’ll have an inkling of just how special this place is. With its endless pools, lagoons and aquariums, thrilling water rides, phenomenal high-roller suites, gourmet restaurants, and action-packed casino, it is quite simply a gaming resort unlike any other in the world.
Atlantis represents the grand vision of Sol Kerzner, the hotel and gambling magnate who first gained renown by creating the most successful hotel group in his native South Africa–Sun International. In 1994, Kerzner purchased the company, Resorts International, from entertainer/entrepreneur Merv Griffin. Its existing property on Paradise Island had once been a popular destination among the jet-set crowd, but over the years it had lost much of its luster, and the Bahamian tourism industry—its lifeblood—was in decline. Kerzner was awed by the beauty of the location and saw vast potential along its two miles of white sand beaches. He set out to build nothing less than the most astounding resort the world had ever seen.
Within eight months, Kerzner completely renovated the 1,147-room resort while spending millions of dollars on service training and staff development. He added new restaurants, amenities and attractions, transforming the resort into his interpretation of the mythical city of Atlantis. (According to legend it had been the world’s most powerful empire until around 9,000 B.C., when an earthquake destroyed it and sank it to the bottom of the sea.)
The resort’s 1994 opening was celebrated with a star-studded gala that announced it to the world. Over the next four years, more than $800 million was spent to continue expanding upon Kerzner’s vision. His new empire boasted the world’s largest open-air marine environment; 11 million gallons of water became home to 50,000 sea creatures from 200 species. The resort was replete with manmade lagoons, waterfalls, a breathtaking waterslide complex built into a soaring Mayan temple, six swimming areas, and a $15-million marina designed to lure high rollers arriving by yacht.
In 1998 Atlantis completed a series of expansions that added the Royal Towers, a $650-million complex containing a 1,200-room hotel, the casino, and a marine habitat. Museum-quality art was commissioned from artists in Europe, Africa, the Bahamas and the United States. In the Great Hall of Waters, the marble-floored main area, a double staircase leads down to a lower level surrounded by towering pillars and cascading waterfalls, overlooking a vast indoor aquarium. The 50,000-square-foot casino is the largest in the Caribbean and houses millions of dollars worth of art. The end result is a resort that could be categorized along with Disney and Las Vegas as one of the world’s most amazing vacation destinations—and one of the only resorts where families and solo gamblers happily coexist.
Over the years, it has never stopped growing. Today, the resort’s 2,315 guest rooms are spread out between its Royal Towers, Harborside Resort Villas, Coral Towers and Beach Tower. There are 166 spectacular suites, including eight unforgettable “Super Suites,” which boast commanding views of the entire resort, 10 Grand Suites, and 103 Regal Suites. Inside the Coral Tower, you’ll find the highly requested Sun Suite on the fourth floor; this lavishly appointed hideaway features three bedrooms and a baby grand piano and sits directly on the beach. Even more incredible is the 6,000-square-foot Bridge Suite, a “mansion in the sky” located in the archway that connects the Royal Tower’s east and west towers. This setup boasts two bedrooms, a spacious balcony, museum-quality antiques, a 2,500-square-foot entertainment area with a bar and piano, and, of course, 24-hour butler service.
Atlantis’s sprawling pool area, just steps from the beach, includes thrilling water-based attractions; no trip is complete without taking the Leap of Faith, a towering vertical water slide that rockets you down the side of the Mayan Temple. Guests are enthralled by The Dig, an indoor exhibit that recreates a lost Atlantian city. As you explore its interconnected underground passageways and chambers filled with “artifacts” from the Lost City and scientific instruments thought to have been used by the ancient civilization, giant windows look into an underwater environment populated by a dazzling array of sea creatures. This is the closest you’ll probably ever get to sharks, barracudas, moray eels, stingrays, and other denizens of the deep. One tank is filled with nothing but lobsters; another is home to an aquatic ballet of undulating jellyfish. The spookiest is a tank populated by giant green moray eels, their long heads extending from pottery jars and caves, their mouths wide open to expose their sharp teeth as they pump water in and out of their sophisticated system of gills. Some people stand entranced by these monsters of the deep; others shudder and turn away.
The resort also contains a long list of upscale shops and restaurants. The Five Twins, long considered the resort’s gourmet room, has been quietly shuttered and is about to become the home of the latest Nobu, the Japanese-Peruvian restaurant wonder headed up by star chef Nobu Matsuhisa. The Atlas Bar and Grill, overlooking one of the marinas and accessible from the casinos, serves casual American fare, while Fathoms, themed to resemble the ruins of the lost city, offers dignified seafood dining and walls that are actually part of the massive aquarium. On the other side of Fathoms lies the Great Hall of Waters, another quiet option for dining by the aquarium walls.
The property’s original Resorts International restaurants—Mamma Loo’s, Villa d’Este and the classic Bahamian Club—are still going strong, but attention is now focused on the delightful Marina Village, home to some of the best restaurants in the resort, including the rebirth of the old Café Martinique, this time taken to second-floor, British Colonial heights with a kitchen and menu created by none other than star chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten. With its winding, cobblestoned alleys lined with shops and restaurants, all overlooking a new marina filled with multi-million-dollar yachts, this has become one of the most popular new attractions at Atlantis, jumping with live music both day and night, offering a stunning array of both casual and sophisticated shopping and dining.
And the mighty Atlantis is growing exponentially larger. In September 2003, it broke ground on its Phase III expansion, which will literally double the size of the entire property. “The overall development is a $600-million development,” Kerzner told the Nassau Guardia newspaper at the time. “Quite frankly, I don’t think there is any company in the hospitality industry today that would undertake, in this present environment, a development of this size—which ultimately, when it is completed, would be a $1.7-billion investment since the resort’s opening.”
“My biggest competition here at Atlantis is Mother Nature,” smiles John Kirk, vice president of casino sales and marketing. “During the day it’s tough for me to get customers in the casino because we have 14 acres of beaches and beautiful pools and resort amenities, which you just can’t compete with. Most gaming occurs in the evening. After people come in from the beaches and pools, they go to dinner, then they come down and gamble. It’s an evening amenity. The Marina Village adds another one-of-a-kind entertainment venue. In the long run it’s going to be very important to us because it offers so many new amenities which will attract more customers, gaming and non-gaming alike.”
And the gaming at Atlantis is changing very rapidly. For years, casino officials have looked to technology to solve a two-sided puzzle in serving their customers. On one side, officials want to track what a player spends and where he wagers while on their property—information that is used to reward them with special offers that match their preferences and comps that appreciate their level of play. On the other side, casino marketers want to make spending and wagering as convenient as possible for the players.
Atlantis Paradise Island has now begun using cutting-edge technology to take both areas of customer service to the next level. The player’s club at Atlantis is merged with the casino cage, the hotel’s front desk and other areas of the resort—and it all happens with a single card issued to the player.
Check in at Atlantis and you’ll get a room key just like at any other hotel. But this is no ordinary room key. This key card will double as your player’s club card in the casino, and as a card to charge food at the resort’s restaurants, or items in its retail outlets, to your hotel bill. It’s a single card that opens your room door, and then opens doors to any other activity you wish to place on your hotel folio.
Once in the casino, though, this card will accomplish even greater feats. The room key unlocks a style of cashless wagering in this Bahamas location that is unlike just about any you’ll find in the U.S.—it is a deposit-based electronic funds transfer (EFT) system that works like a debit card. Using the “Powerbank” system supplied by Bally Gaming & Systems, the casino allows customers to make a deposit at the cage on the room-key/player’s club card. After that, you use a PIN at any machine or table on the floor to withdraw funds from the account you’ve created. On the slots, you use a keypad to withdraw funds at predetermined amounts, which are downloaded directly to the machine as credits.
Then you play, without touching your wallet. Your wins and losses are recorded to the account created for the card. At the end of your session, you can cash the card out at the cage or leave the balance on the card for another visit.
Most of this is unprecedented in the North American casino industry. While vendors and casinos have been talking for years of merging a hotel room card with a player’s club card, Atlantis has made the Bahamas the first gaming jurisdiction to actually bring the concept to reality. And while casinos in Europe have warmed to EFT cashless systems, only New York’s Turning Stone casino has used a debit-card system for slot play on this side of the Atlantic—and that one uses player’s club cards that are not linked to the hotel side.
“It’s the ultimate in convenience,” says Kirk. “We have a lot of repeat business on the casino side, and people often lose their cards. Now, every time they check in, they get a new room key with their account number encoded on it.”
But it’s the link with the cashless casino wagering system that gives the Atlantis its one-two punch with customers. “We just did $5 million worth of upgrades, including 450 new slots, all coinless-operated with ticket-in/ticket-out,” Kirk says. “Ticketing at Atlantis has been very well-received, just like in the rest of the industry. Now, we are taking coinless wagering to the next level.”
One bonus: Since Atlantis is in the Bahamas, once you make your deposit and leave the cage, you can play without interruption while your card logs jackpots up to $10,000. No W2G forms. “We don’t have that problem,” says Kirk. “We will not lock our games unless there is a jackpot of $10,000 or more. Then, regulations require us to open the game and verify that the chip hasn’t been tampered with. Here, most people will be very happy if their machine locks up!”
Kirk says the high rollers at Atlantis love the system. “We have customers who can put $2 million to $3 million through the games in one trip,” he says. “Usually, that’s a lot of work—you have to carry bills, feed them into validators. With these customers, our system catches on like wildfire, because they make only one transaction at the cage and play off their card. It’s a level of convenience they’ve never seen.” He adds that table players use the account as if they were taking credit markers. “The beauty, he says, is that they are not taking credit—they’re just using their own cash.”
What if you lose the card? Since it’s PIN-protected, you just go and get another card. When you do, that changes a special suffix number on the account so the lost card is invalidated.
Kirk predicts that the system now being used at Atlantis will spread quickly. “You’ll probably see this within a year or two in Las Vegas or Atlantic City,” he says.
Many of the new games on the floor are multi-denominational. “You don’t need to search the floor to find your game,” says Kirk. Titles such as the wildly popular Cleopatra allow players to gamble at the denomination they want, whether it’s nickel, quarter or dollar. The casino hosts five annual slot tournaments including the $100,000 President’s Invitational that is limited to 100 participants. Table tournaments include two $150,000 blackjack tournaments, a $50,000 blackjack tournament, $150,000 craps and baccarat tournaments, as well as various cash and large prize giveaways. “We try to keep our giveaways interesting,” says Kirk. “For our Diamond Giveaway, the winner was flown to Antwerp Belgium to visit a diamond factory and pick $100,000 worth of custom diamond jewelry.”
“Many people know Atlantis as a world-class resort, but a lot of people don’t understand the quality of the casino operation we have here,” says Kirk. “Traditionally, Caribbean casinos are known to be small: 10 or 20,000 square feet, maybe 100 or 200 slot machines and 20 table games. But this casino would not look out of place on the Las Vegas Strip.”
Atlantis has understandably done wonders for the local economy. In 2000, the resort contributed $387 million, or 8 percent of the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product). It’s been estimated that by 2008 this number will rise to 11 percent.
Phase III will bring a new hotel tower, and then yet another tower filled with hotel-condominium units. (Purchase a unit and the staff can rent it out as a hotel room, putting money back in your pockets when you’re not staying there.) This tower is a joint project with the Miami-based Turnberry Corporation, which has had tremendous success building top-of-the-line condo towers in Las Vegas. Atlantis will also be adding another water attraction featuring dolphins, allowing guests to get up close to these remarkable creatures; you’ll also be able to take a water ride through lush tropical jungles, navigating exciting rapids and waterways. Other additions will include a new, full-throttle nightclub which promises to be a hit with Atlantis’ younger crowd. You’ll have to wait till March 2007 to see how it all turns out, but as Kirk says, “To put it mildly, you’ll be stunned.”
Atlantis isn’t the only property in The Bahamas with expansion plans. The older Crystal Palace and its Cable Beach neighbor are about to undergo more than $1.5 billion in renovations, new hotels and plenty of growth, including one-third ownership by Harrah’s, which is expected to bring its Caesars brand to the island paradise.
But that doesn’t have Atlantis concerned a bit.
“I think it will be great to have all the millions of Harrah’s Total Rewards customers come down to Nassau to take a look at the new property,” says Kirk. “Because once they see Atlantis, they’ll certainly want to stay here.”
If you’re curious to learn more about taking your action to Atlantis, simply call the direct line to the casino: 1-800-PLAY-711. Since the resort has branch offices throughout the country, they can put you in contact with the player development executive closest to where you live so that you can start planning your trip and learning what benefits you may be eligible for.
Adam Fine and Frank Legato contributed to this article.
