As SLS Las Vegas prepares to welcome new ownership, President Terry Downey and Chief Financial Officer Robert Schaffhauser have stepped down just seven months after joining the struggling north Strip resort.
Downey, a longtime Station Casinos executive, joined SLS in January along with Schaffhauser with a mandate to revive the casino hotel’s fortunes under owner Stockbridge Capital Partners. Schaffhauser worked under Downey at North Las Vegas’ Aliante casino hotel, which Downey headed for four years before resigning last October, along with Schaffhauser, after Boyd Gaming bought it.
Stockbridge, a San Francisco-based real estate fund, inherited the SLS from Los Angeles nightclub magnate Sam Nazarian and sold it in May to Alex Meruelo, owner of Reno’s Grand Sierra Hotel. The sale is expected to close in September.
“It is not uncommon to see senior management change when a property is sold,” said Union Gaming analyst John Decree. “There could be some more changes.”
Those are likely to include some of the 12 executives Downey and Schaffhauser recruited from Aliante, including the chief information officer, the vice president of marketing and entertainment, the director of slots, the director of data base marketing and the director of catering and conventions.
The SLS was Nazarian’s brainchild. He spent $415 million to graft it onto the shuttered Sahara Hotel and Casino as a new entertainment concept aimed at a big-spending younger audience of the type he catered to in LA. It opened to great fanfare in 2014, but hobbled in no small part by its remote north Strip location, it promptly lost more than $100 million in its first nine months of operation, at which point it stopped publicly reporting financials.
Reports are that Meruelo may change the name back to the Sahara in a bid to reconnect gamblers with a well-remembered Strip icon with deep roots in Vegas history.
Coincidentally, during his tenure, Downey launched a new player loyalty program called Club 52 in homage to the Sahara, which opened in 1952.
