The tower that wouldn't open
Every film on this page tells the saga because the saga is the resort: construction began in 2007, the recession stopped it in 2009, the tower sat frozen for eight years, work restarted in 2021, and it finally opened in December 2023 — $3.7 billion and 16 years in the making, as the summer tour frames it. The day-one film is dated on camera — December 14, 2023 — everything hours old: a two-floor coffee shop in pastel pinks, an IV drip lounge still 'coming soon,' restaurants not yet open. The opening-week walkthrough (the host's most anticipated tour) moves floor by floor through fresh flowers and a glimpsed high-limit room. Both are presented as what they are: the opening state of a resort, not its current one.
The verdicts since
The considered review, after a full stay, calls Fontainebleau the Strip's 'newest and possibly most polarizing hotel' — and argues it may be its most attainable luxury: 500,000 square feet of convention space and the Convention Center next door keep rates honest. A first stay in the cheapest room finds the resort strangely empty — jewelry stores and a café-smelling corridor to themselves; the quiet itself becomes the story at a resort built for crowds. A British visitor's walk measures the finished building (pool deck and LIV Beach, where weekend entry ran $100 for non-guests as filmed; the Miami sister property compared). The summer portrait — solstice filming, two summers after opening — finds it in full operation: Miami-inspired rooms, the Oasis pool and poolside café, secluded patio dining steps from the water.
The deep stay
The longest film (2026, fifty-plus minutes) is a third visit that assumes you've seen the tours: the Regal Suite, restaurants the host hadn't tried, in-room dining ordered off the bow-tie menu by QR. An opening-era stay supplies the first impressions the resort wanted: a warm gold-glow lobby, marble everywhere, bow ties as the house motif, florals you can smell, Snake River Farms Wagyu and a server-insisted mushroom risotto at dinner ('the risotto is killer'). The Fontainebleau's question was never whether it would be beautiful — it was whether anyone would come. This page is the record of both answers arriving.
Sources: the eight videos on this page — opening-day and opening-week documents, a post-stay verdict, a first stay, a British walk, a summer portrait, an opening-era stay, and a 2026 deep stay — summarized from their entries in our catalog.