Thousands of workers credited as Hard Rock’s Guitar Hotel hits major milestone — PHOTOS

The Strip’s largest resort construction project hit a major milestone Friday morning as the final structural beam was placed atop the Guitar Hotel Las Vegas.

Nineteen months to the day that ground first broke at the site of the former Mirage hotel-casino, Hard Rock International and Seminole Gaming hosted a topping-off ceremony to commemorate structural completion of the 660-foot guitar-shaped hotel at the center of the Strip.

“We sit here at the foot of a structure that will change the skyline, will bring in millions more visitors to the Las Vegas Strip, and also employ up to 6,000 Las Vegas residents from our community,” said Joe Lupo, president of Hard Rock Las Vegas. “It’s truly an honor for the Hard Rock Las Vegas team, who are here today, knowing we will be handed the keys in about a year and a half, and confidently opening the next great, highly successful resort here in Las Vegas.”

In addition to the construction of the Guitar Hotel, crews are also working on a total transformation of the former Mirage tri-tower structure, which will become Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Las Vegas. The approximately $4 billion resort complex is scheduled to open in the late second half of 2027.

“The progress speaks for itself. The quality of the work is amazing,” said Ragheb Dajani, senior vice president of development for Hard Rock International. “With all the hard work of all the thousands of construction workers, we set ourselves up to not only reach this milestone successfully but also help push forward to finish this project. That is the significance of this milestone.”

Dajani said that although the word “iconic” gets thrown around a lot, it was “appropriate” to use in describing the Guitar Hotel.

“The guitar tower is going to be the next landmark in Vegas,” he said. “It is a building that everybody’s going to know and recognize. We don’t have to put names or signs on it.”

While Friday’s event was largely symbolic, the gratitude and appreciation shown to workers from Penta Building Group and McCarthy Building Companies, as well as the design team from Klai Juba Wald, were very real.

“From day one, this construction team has been committed and dedicated to this incredible project, maintaining the highest standards of safety while creating an extraordinary project,” Lupo told a gathered crowd of invited guests and scores of construction workers.

Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom also heaped praise on the construction crews during Friday’s ceremony.

“We’re so proud of who we are in Las Vegas and the fact that we have the best workers in the world,” he said. “And nowhere else could you build this kind of a project, this fast, this quality.”

Jeff Walker, vice president of construction for Penta, said the Guitar Hotel project has expanded the existing property’s footprint by 1.4 million square feet, used 14.5 million pounds of structural steel and seen roughly 100,000 yards of concrete poured.

“But the most important part, and along with delivering this project in a quality manner, on time and under budget, is getting everybody home in the same condition they came to work,” he said, noting there has only been one lost-time accident since work began in the summer of 2024.

The Guitar Hotel will consist of 42 stories, with the lower 100 feet of the tower containing the first five floors, and the remaining 560 feet housing its 675 hotel rooms and suites.

When finished, the new Hard Rock complex will feature nearly 3,600 hotel rooms, approximately 175,000 square feet of gaming space, two spas, multiple pools, live entertainment venues, and dozens of restaurants, lounges, and retail outlets.

Hard Rock International, which is owned by the Seminole Tribe of Florida, purchased The Mirage for $1.075 billion in 2022 from Las Vegas-based MGM Resorts International. Hard Rock closed The Mirage on July 17, 2024.