Caesars Virginia has made a big impact on Danville, even before opening its doors. Now the city is ready for the grand opening.

Caesars Virginia is buzzing with activity, though its doors are not yet open.

Workers on scaffolding nearly 12 stories in the air are installing the company’s logo on the casino resort’s hotel tower, exactly one week before the grand opening. Construction crews are working around the clock on finishing touches, both inside and outside the resort. 

Among the flashing lights of the slot machines on the gaming floor sit cardboard boxes, hard hats and carts full of construction materials. Some employees chatter about where to wheel dollies carrying additional slot machines, while others raise scissor lifts to paint and caulk parts of the ceiling. 

“There’s a little work going on everywhere,” said Chris Albrecht, Caesars Virginia general manager. “[We’re] getting ready for game time to show the Danville community this amazing facility.”

When guests arrive, they’ll park outside the casino resort in a parking deck or surface lot, in the shadow of the hotel tower and the Three Sisters smokestacks behind it. 

They’ll walk under a porte-cochère and through glass double doors into the resort’s lobby, where a greater-than-life-sized statue of Roman emperor Augustus stands under a golden chandelier amongst white marble columns. 

To the left is the gaming floor, outfitted with almost 1,500 slot machines and nearly 80 table games and centered around a circular bar. To the right is the lobby bar, named Thread in a nod to the area’s history with the textile industry, as well as the front desk and Gordon Ramsay’s restaurant, Ramsay’s Kitchen. 

Through the gaming floor is a string of three local restaurants inspired by Danville’s River District, a noodle bar, the World Series of Poker room and the Caesars Sportsbook sports betting section, complete with large televisions. 

“We had several thousand [visitors] come to our temporary facility’s grand opening, and I think we’re going to expect to see more than double or triple that next week,” Albrecht said.

Caesars Virginia opens Dec. 17 after two and a half years of construction and a short delay from the original open date of Dec. 12. The permanent casino resort represents the creation of a brand new industry in Southside that has already made an impact on Danville, even before its grand opening. 

The city has seen hundreds of jobs created, millions of dollars in gaming tax revenue, a new city department, skyrocketing visitor spending, a new academic program, workforce development efforts and increasing lodging demand since the casino’s groundbreaking in 2022. 

Where the money goes

The Danville police department is now headquartered in a renovated Dan River Mills executive office building, just seconds away from Caesars Virginia. 

The $18 million project was partially funded by Caesars, and it provided equipment, technology and space that the department had been lacking for years. 

Police officers and staff were relocated from the crowded basement of City Hall to the new building in 2022, as casino construction was underway. 

That project would not have been possible so quickly without casino funds, said City Manager Ken Larking.

“You can’t do those sorts of things without these resources,” Larking said. “The influx of several million dollars accelerates things that would’ve taken a lot longer for a general fund budget to fund.”

Danville has been able to start — and even finish, in instances like the police department — projects that otherwise would’ve taken years or even decades to materialize. 

The city is projected to see an additional $35 million to $40 million after the casino resort’s first full year of operations, Larking said. The city’s total budget for the 2024 fiscal year is about $140 million. 

The city has received about $18 million in gaming tax revenue from the temporary casino since it opened in May 2023. This figure is as of October 2024, the most recent data reported from the Virginia Lottery.

This is slightly ahead of the amount projected in the city manager’s proposed budget. Larking said this is because Danville tends to budget conservatively. 

The city also collects a local supplement from Caesars as part of the development agreement, which has amounted to about $8 million during fiscal years 2024 and 2025 so far. 

The challenge now is how best to spend that money, Larking said.

The Investing in Danville Committee, which is composed of residents, stakeholders and community leaders, was created before the temporary casino opened. It will guide the city on how to spend gaming revenue, suggesting a focus on things like city infrastructure, public education, quality of life and economic opportunities. 

Larking said he’s heard some residents request that Caesars revenue be used to help lower property or utility taxes. But the city would prefer to spend the money on one-time projects rather than relying on it for recurring costs or core services, he said. 

“We want to be as careful as we can about using it,” Larking said. “The fact of the matter is that Danville is a low-tax area as it is, compared to other places.”

Caesars has also made an economic impact on Danville in more indirect ways.

The permanent casino is expected to employ over 1,200 people at the permanent resort. 

“Hiring is still ongoing and will always be ongoing,” Albrecht said. “We are getting very close, actually, to that 1,200 number.”

It has also promised to work with local businesses and vendors. Some of the restaurants in the resort are local concepts, modeled after the River District’s architecture and created by Danville developer Rick Barker and Virginia restaurateur Steve Parry. 

“Caesars said they would make an effort to work with local businesses and put them in their supply chain,” Barker said in an October interview. “To their credit, they are making good on that commitment. They have even had seminars to teach local businesses how to sell to them.”

A growing impact on tourism 

Lisa Meriwether’s job in Danville was created because the casino was coming to town, before construction even began.

Meriwether is the city’s tourism director, leading a tourism department that didn’t even exist until the casino resort was approved. 

Danville voters approved the casino resort through a referendum vote in November 2020, and a year later to the month, Meriwether was hired to lead tourism efforts for the city. 

“When it passed the referendum by the citizens, that November, [the city] said, ‘We need a tourism program. We cannot let this community be just about Caesars Virginia. … We need to raise the tide for all our tourism assets,’” she said. 

Since then, the tourism department, which is housed under the city’s economic development department, has been working to do that. 

“We were starting on this before there was a shovel in the ground,” Meriwether said. “A tourism program elevates visitor experiences to give them the very best experience that we possibly can.”

The department launched a tourism brand, Visit SoSi, in May 2023 after an extensive survey process to understand how residents thought about the tourism assets in their region. Visit SoSi promotes a variety of attractions and activities in addition to the casino. 

This way, when visitors come to the casino, they can learn about the other things that the region has to offer, Meriwether said.

“The resort is going to be the hub for so many of our visitors,” she said. “But who wouldn’t want to experience things like the Sovah Beer Trail when they get here? They might not know about it yet, but we’re going to be providing that information.”

There have been conversations about a shuttle service between the Caesars resort and Danville’s River District, Larking said, though nothing is in place yet. 

Even though the scope of the tourism department is bigger than the Caesars Virginia resort, Meriwether said she doesn’t think the department or the brand would have been launched without the casino’s arrival. 

“I think a program would have come here had the announcement not taken place, but maybe not immediately,” she said. “Tourism as an industry has always been here. But the packaging of the industry to make it generate revenue takes effort, promotion and aggressive marketing.”

The Danville-Pittsylvania region outperformed all other regions in Virginia for visitor spending in 2023, according to figures presented by the Virginia Restaurant Lodging Travel Association at an October tourism summit. 

Casino spending is considered part of recreation spending, which is now the largest share of spending in the city and county, accounting for $215 million in direct visitor dollars in 2023, according to a presentation at the summit. 

Training tomorrow’s hospitality employees

The temporary casino opened with 400 workers, some of whom were local residents trained for positions like card dealers. Caesars needed 800 more to fully staff the permanent resort, and it turned to the community to reach that number through workforce development and educational programs.

In 2023, Caesars Virginia announced that it would invest half a million dollars to create a hospitality and tourism academic program at Averett University.

Hospitality management is offered as a minor or concentration under the school’s business administration program.

The idea behind this program is to create a local talent pipeline for the growing hospitality and tourism industries in Danville, said Tiffany Franks, Averett’s president. 

“Our goal from the outset has been to help develop the highly skilled workers that support not only Caesars but the whole hospitality sector,” Franks said. 

Much as Visit Sosi promotes the casino alongside other attractions, the program is meant to benefit both Caesars and local hospitality and tourism businesses.

Still, Franks said this program likely wouldn’t have been created at Averett without Caesars locating in Danville. 

“Our region was already expanding in this space, but given Caesars’ massive size and reputation … it has been a real catalyst,” she said. “I think we would’ve kept expanding in terms of hospitality and tourism, but I don’t think it would’ve happened as fast or been as dramatic.”

Thomas Perugini, director of the program, agreed. Perugini moved to Danville from Florida with no former ties to the region to lead the program. 

Averett offers these courses both in-person and online. No students have graduated from the program yet because it is so new, Perugini said, but about 20 are currently enrolled in the courses.

Caesars was also Averett’s first partner for its Workforce Rx initiative, which works with local employers to provide online professional development training to employees. 

It’s free to the employees. It was funded by a $250,000 grant from the city. 

“We meet once a month and review different subject matter to make existing managers at hotels and restaurants better at what they’re currently doing, as well as to give them some sort of credential,” Perugini said. 

This program ensures that education and workforce development in this industry go hand-in-hand, he said. 

“[At Averett], we’ve kind of deemed ourselves as the hospitality educator of the region,” Perugini said. “We’ve tried to get involved in all levels, not only degree-seeking students.”

There have also been early conversations around a culinary innovation lab in Danville that would provide a workforce pipeline for the culinary industry.

Franks said that Caesars approached Averett about this, anticipating that the casino resort will need culinary arts workers.

The university, Danville Community College, and other regional educational institutions have been having conversations with the city about the feasibility of a culinary training program, Larking said.

That program could create a pathway into the Averett hospitality program, Perugini said, and will benefit not only Caesars but other local businesses. 

Bringing high-dollar lodgings to Danville

Though Caesars is bringing 320 hotel rooms online in Danville, its opening will create a lodging demand that is expected to exceed what it can supply. The casino resort is expected to bring 2 million annual visitors to the region. 

The least expensive room rate at the resort, according to its website, is currently $299 per night, with prices as high as $1,159 the first weekend after the grand opening.

Rooms at Danville’s Hampton Inn usually go for around $150 per night.

“There’s no booking history for this resort,” Meriwether said. “When hotels, resorts, any kind of lodging facility opens, typically, they structure their rates based on their supply and demand, their history patterns. There’s none here … They’re going to start building their history.”

Albrecht said that Caesars’ customer base dictates the room rates. 

“We put them out there, we start to see what settles in,” he said. “We know what the other hotels in this market are doing in regard to their rates, and we kind of adjust with those. That’s really going to be an ongoing process, that’s how hotel yielding works.”

The city is working on a lodging demand analysis that was originally slated to be complete by mid-2024 but has still not been released. But even without the analysis, Meriwether said there has been an “incredible” increase in lodging demand in Danville. 

To respond, the developers of Danville’s boutique hotel, The Bee, opened a sister property in 2023 called the Holbrook Hotel. 

The Bee’s developer, Ed Walker, has announced a third property, which will be located in a rehabilitated Dan River Mills property adjacent to the casino site. It is expected to come online in 2025.

The boutique hotel properties offer a more upscale stay that is preferred by some visitors, Meriwether said.

But the fact remains: “We need full-service properties,” she said. 

It’s likely that not every business wanting to hold a conference in Caesars’ meeting and convention space will be able to due to scheduling, Meriwether said, so Danville needs more hotels that have these amenities.

“We have a great product [with Caesars Virginia], but Friday through Sunday they’re going to be full,” she said. 

And she doesn’t want to see casino visitors driving across the state border to stay at North Carolina hotels, Meriwether said. 

“We love our visitors from North Carolina, but we want them coming to us. We don’t want our experiences driving people to other communities,” she said. “We need responsible growth, unlike anything this community has seen in the hospitality sector. … It’s got to be something that continues to attract visitors for years to come.”