Tioga Downs Casino has begun booking guests into portions of its new 161-room hotel in advance of the hotel’s grand opening on December 1, almost one year exactly after New York’s first full-scale privately owned casino opened its doors.
The six-story hotel features three pools, a spa, a fitness center, two rooftop decks and an events center with banquet and reception areas. A restaurant is on the way, along with a new clubhouse for the golf course at nearby Tioga County Country Club.
Owner Jeff Gural called the hotel’s debut a “major milestone” in ongoing efforts to transform New York’s Southern Tier region into a bona fide tourist destination.
“It enables us to use the hotel as a benefit for our best customers and it just adds the ability to spend a weekend here,” Gural said. “Our goal is to make it easier for people coming from beyond a 50-mile radius.”
Tioga Downs’ offering was limited to harness racing and video lottery terminals before Gural, who also owns New York’s Vernon Downs harness track and racino, was able to prevail on the state to grant it one of the seven commercial casino licenses authorized by voters in 2013. Three of the licenses are now attached to operating casinos. A fourth is slated to debut in the Catskills in the first quarter of next year. Tioga Downs was the first, completing its conversion into a full-scale casino last December. The property now has 944 machine games, 32 house-banked tables and 12 poker tables and is projecting $75 million in gaming revenue this year and $75 million in 2018.
