Changes ahead for hot spots, hotels in Vegas

The 1,504-room Hard Rock Hotel & Casino two miles east of the Strip at Harmon Avenue and Paradise Road in Las Vegas will close for about four months later this year and will reemerge as a Virgin Hotel in 2020. Dates for the transformation are unknown. Virgin Hotels operates lodgings in San Francisco and Chicago, and more are planned.

The Joint, the Hard Rock’s popular music venue, will remain but will be upgraded and may be renamed. Rehab, the Hard Rock’s five-acre party pool area, closed in October and is to be redeveloped before the 2020 reopening.

No decisions have yet been made about which restaurants and bars the new Virgin Hotel will partner with.

Vegas won’t be without the Hard Rock name. The Hard Rock Cafe Las Vegas, unrelated to the hotel, stands at a separate location at 3771 S. Las Vegas Blvd.

Meanwhile, Eataly, the grand Italian marketplace that opened a branch last year in Los Angeles, has opened in the Park MGM in Las Vegas.

It has seven specialty food counters, two restaurants, three bars, a chef ’s demonstration table and a “kitchen of the market” concept that lets customers eat in or take away. The marketplace is aiming to stay open, in some parts, 24 hours a day.

And in parking/resort fee news, the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas has stopped charging guests up to $10 a night to park at the hotel-resort, but it also plans to increase its daily resort fee from $35 to $39 plus tax. The new fee went into effect last week.

In July, Wynn Encore modified its parking costs. Visitors who spend $50 at the resort, whether it’s on food, drinks, gambling, shopping or shows, received free parking.