Bally's Las Vegas
Bally's Las Vegas is a hotel and casino located in Las Vegas, Nevada on the Las Vegas Strip. The hotel has 2,814 rooms and banquet and meeting space.
Bally's is home for the long-running production show Jubilee!.
One of the signature features of this hotel is the neon lighting wrapped around the covered moving sidewalk that brings guests from Las Vegas Boulevard to the entrance of the casino.
The hotel has a Las Vegas Monorail station at the rear of the property.
The site was first occupied by the Bonanza Hotel and Casino which opened in July 1963. It was later renamed to the New Bonanza Hotel and Casino. The New Bonanza Hotel and Casino was replaced with the original MGM Grand.
The (original) MGM Grand opened in 1973 with 2,084 rooms, the largest hotel in the world at that time. Kirk Kerkorian was the owner. The hotel had a movie theme when it opened. On November 21, 1980 a fire in the hotel killed 87 people.
The facility was rebuilt in only eight months. The fire was, and still remains, the largest disaster in Nevada history in terms of loss of life. The fire resulted in a major reform in fire safety codes for the city's casino resorts, which are now among the strictest in the United States.
The hotel was later sold in 1985 to Bally Entertainment Corporation, and the property's name was changed to Bally's. Bally's was later taken over by Hilton Corporation. In 1998, Hilton spun off its casino holdings into a new company, Park Place Entertainment, later known as Caesars Entertainment. That company merged with Harrah's Entertainment in 2003.
At the end of June 2005, Harrah's Entertainment CEO Gary Loveman announced that the company would consolidate all its properties under a few brand names: Harrah's, Rio, Caesars, and Horseshoe. This implies that Bally's will be re-branded in the future.
