Las Vegas to Open Pot-Friendly Hotel

The Siegel Group, a Las Vegas-based commercial real estate and development company, confirmed last week it had completed the sale of the Artisan Hotel Boutique to Pro Hospitality Group. 

The new owner, Pro Hospitality, already operates a cannabis-friendly hotel on Clarendon Ave in Phoenix called The Clarendon. The hotel's website says it offers "cannabis-friendly rooms" where they allow "vaping, dubbing, flower, etc." however they "do not allow tobacco products to be smoked in the room due to the lasting smell and residue." 

The hotel includes a cannabis lounge open for hotel guests and the general public. It is also "working on a cannabis shuttle service to take hotel guests from the hotel to a local dispensary and back again," the website says. 

Similar services will probably be available at Pro Hospitality's new Vegas location. Plans to start an overhaul of the Artisan Hotel are scheduled for the next 60 days and should finish by the end of summer. 

Rizk said that when the regulations are in place at the state and local levels, he will convert the Artisan into a "cannabis-friendly" venture for all tourists to the city. "This is a lifestyle, boutique hotel," he said. 

The hotel's previous owner, the Siegel Group, acquired the Artisan Hotel in 2009, "transforming the location into one of the most well-known and visited boutique hotels in Las Vegas," the company said in a statement related to the recent sale. 

"The hotel gained a loyal following among locals, tourists, and boutique enthusiasts who were drawn to the location's eclectic design and hip, intimate atmosphere," the company wrote. "The unique hotel contained a bar lounge with a popular after-hours scene, a restaurant, wedding chapel, and one of the few topless pools in town."

The state of Nevada authorized cannabis-friendly lounges last year. Under the new Assembly Bill 341, operators can apply for a license to open a cannabis lounge at their property. The lounges will allow the onsite consumption of pot products, a concept that has been likened to Amsterdam's coffee shops. 

Clark County officials said in January that they were keeping track of efforts to regulate cannabis consumption lounges at the state level. Only 20 licenses will be given out for the independent lounge licenses in the early application stage. Ownership groups with multiple stores that could use opening a lounge will only be allowed to have a single consumption lounge license. For instance, if a company has three dispensaries, it could only open one lounge. 

Nevada legalized the adult use of cannabis after a successful ballot initiative in 2016, but until now, the consumption of cannabis products has been limited to private properties. The recent legalization of regulated cannabis lounges was intended to give tourists a place to enjoy the state's cannabis reform benefits. 

Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom, who acted as a state senator in 2017, was among the first who lobbied for legalizing cannabis lounges, considering that it would be a "game-changer" for the hospitality sector.

"Consumption lounges are so perfect for our tourism industry," Segerblom told the Las Vegas Review-Journal last year. "The sooner we get out there, the more we'll be looked upon as a marijuana-friendly city and state."