Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Joe Gref of JPM.
Joe Gref - JPM
A question for you -- you had mentioned third quarter you saw some heightened competition in select markets. Could you comment if some of those, those heightened promotions as competitive forces, if they have abated here so far in October? And then Dan or Steve, could you just talk about how you are thinking about CapEx spend for next year for Sugar Cane Bay in terms of how we should be thinking about modeling it and then how much, I know it’s not going to be a lot, but for Baton Rouge, how to think about that for 2010? Thank you.
Daniel R. Lee
Let me address the competition and then I think Carlos can pull together the CapEx, or Steve you got it -- either one of you have it, so -- the most obvious was actually up at Belterra where [inaudible] opened a $300 million plus replacement of their original 14-year-old riverboat and the new one is bigger and more on one floor than the old one. And then also very early in the quarter, or maybe late in the second quarter, Indiana Live opened their permanent facility, which was head and shoulders better than the temporary tent they had before that. So Belterra actually faced a lot of new competition in its market and I think we did -- I think our management team did real well there while holding their own. We are still the market leader in terms of quality. It’s clearly the best casino hotel experience in Southern Indiana and so the fact that other guys are bigger but not better allowed us to pretty much hold their own and we are up some but given the magnitude of the increase in competition, I thought we did pretty well, especially given the economy and that is a part of the world where the economy has not done well.
In New Orleans, we had several weak months over the summer and we had a bunch of focus groups where we invited in customers who we had seen less of and the whole management team went down and listened to what our customers told us on why we were seeing them less. I actually expected them to talk about the road because the road leading to us has been under construction with the new flood wall and so on and it turns out the road wasn’t that big an issue. And the economy was one thing we kept hearing but the other thing we kept hearing was promotions that were being offered along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and I think a little bit of what happened there, and we’ve seen it -- you know, we live in Las Vegas, even though we don’t have a casino here, the group travel business and convention business last year just dropped off a cliff, as AIG [got criticized] for their corporate boondoggles and so on, and so the resort casino hotels in Las Vegas and along the Gulf Coast like [Beau Rivage] and others saw their occupancies drop off rather dramatically. And beginning last spring, they started competing back by discounting their rooms, and so frankly this summer in Las Vegas, you could get rooms at hotel for $150 a night, with a $50 meal coupon and that same room a year before would have been $500. And I think in a small way, you saw a lot of that on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and that doesn’t mean that their numbers were up -- it just means they were -- they are sitting there with these large hotels trying to figure out how to fill the rooms and so they started sending out free overnight stays or cheap overnight stays at the locals market in New Orleans and that cut into our play zone there.
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