Raising Atlantis?

• Author: Luxner, Larry
• Position: The Atlantis Paradise Island resort and casino in the Bahamas is being expanded to some 2,300 rooms at a cost of $450 million by owner Sol Kerzner - Brief Article

What's being billed as one of the world's largest island resorts is rapidly rising on Paradise Island, an eight-hundred-acre spit of land just over the bridge from Nassau. Sun International Bahamas, a consortium controlled by South African multimillionaire investor Sol Kerzner, is spending $450 million to more than double the size of its existing 1,138-room Atlantis Paradise Island resort to over 2,300 rooms. That would dwarf any other hotel in the Caribbean, and its fifty-thousand-square-foot casino would be the largest in the world outside Las Vegas.

"This is probably the biggest private construction project the Bahamas has ever seen," says Timothy Brown, the company's project manager. "We're looking at an $800 million investment, with a total of 5,400 permanent employees," up from the current 3,500.

According to Vincent Vanderpool-Wallace, director-general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism, the expanded Atlantis will pull in an additional 250,000 stopover visitors a year to the Bahamas. Based on an average $900 expenditure per tourist, that means an extra $225 million in foreign exchange--not an insignificant amount in a country where tourism generates $1.4 billion a year, or 60 percent of GDP.

Built in 1969, the property now known as the Atlantis had its ups and downs as it went through several owners and names--the most recent of them being Merv Griffin's Paradise Island Resort & Casino. In December 1994, Sun International bought the hotel and over the last four years has modernized most of its facilities. A 100,000-square-foot entertainment center opened in the new Royal Towers complex in September, while the the rest of the hotel will be inaugurated in December. Guests at the hotel already have access to a casino featuring eight hundred slot machines and baccarat, blackjack, roulette and craps, as well as a fourteen-acre waterscape park featuring a 3.2 million-gallon saltwater, open-air aquarium.

Yet not all is paradise on Paradise Island. Early in September, a forty-eight-hour strike at the Atlantis...