The official opening doesn’t come until the long Memorial Day weekend at the end of May, but the Revel resort and casino has its “pre-opening” celebration at the beginning of next week.

Revel Casino
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Governor Chris Christie says the Revel project is very significant “because it’s a multi-billion dollar investmen,t and it’s a signal that people have faith in Atlantic City’s ability to come back and be successful again – it’s exciting because once you see the place you’re not going to be able to believe it…this is a pretty extraordinary place – when people go there they’re going to be excited to spend time there and really enjoy themselves.”

He says “I believe it’s going to spur more growth and more investment in Atlantic City, as more people go down there to enjoy Revel…I’m proud the state has played a part as an equity partner in it to make it happen and create the jobs that were created to build it, and create the jobs that are going to be needed to run the race in a professional way.”

Christie points out “the thing that Revel will permit us to do with additional rooms is to have even more rooms down there to be able to hold large-scale conventions – one of the complaints about Atlantic City over the years is there haven’t been the hotel rooms- the luxury hotel rooms that people who were on Conventions want to have – there hasn’t been enough of those in Atlantic City…also, this is going to spur some more capital investment by current casino ownership in the casinos that already exist.”

The Governor adds “you’re going to see in the very near future the roll-out of some very significant investment in the marketing of Atlantic City both in the region and around the country…when I became Governor I was shocked to find out that the Atlantic City Convention and Visitors Bureau spent more on salary and benefits than it spent on advertising Atlantic City -well, that’s a problem.”

He says ” Las Vegas spends 90 million dollars a year promoting Las Vegas, and Atlantic City Spent 4 million a year promoting Atlantic City – that’s not a fair fight – so we’re going to make it much more of a fair fight…we have the one thing that none of the rest of them have – we have the Atlantic Ocean – and so we should be the summer Convention destination for people who want to have casino gambling as one of their options when they go to their convention – and at least at the moment, there’s no one else who can offer that in the way that Atlantic City can.”

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