Weil has vast international experience in the travel and leisure industry as well as allied fields including restaurants, amusement parks, and gaming facilities. Our experience includes representing buyers and sellers of hotel chains and individual premier hotels, resorts, and casinos, lenders and private equity firms with hotel interests, as well as hotels and casinos facing chapter 11 or out-of-court debt restructurings. We have extensive knowledge of the hospitality and leisure industry in multiple jurisdictions, including US, UK, France, Germany and China, and understand the legal and cultural issues specific to each market. Our ability to coordinate our counsel across the breadth of the firm has led to our leading role on notable cross-border and international transactions of great strategic and commercial value within the industry, including key M&A, financing, securities, governance, restructuring, and capital markets assignments.

Some of our signature matters in the industry include:

• Bally’s in its chapter 11 restructuring;
• The Blackstone Group in over 30 joint ventures, including those involving hotel companies and individual properties;
• Citi in connection with various loans including a $1.4 billion loan to KSL Capital Partners Management II, LLC for the acquisition of ClubCorp, the owner of the Barton Creek Resort in Texas, the Homestead Resort in Virginia, various golf courses and numerous clubs;
• Extended Stay Inc. and its affiliates, the largest owner of mid-priced extended stay hotels with over 680 hotels across 44 states and 2 Canadian provinces, in its chapter 11 bankruptcy case;
• Magna Entertainment Corp., one of the leading owners and operators of horse racetracks, in its chapter 11 bankruptcy case with approximately $960 million in debt;
• The New York Racing Association Inc. (NYRA), the non-profit owner and operator of New York State’s premier thoroughbred racetracks, Belmont, Saratoga and Aqueduct, in connection with its chapter 11 bankruptcy case and litigation against the State of New York and various of its agencies;
• Regal Hotels in the first IPO of a hotel real estate investment trust in Hong Kong;
• Six Flags, one of the world’s largest regional theme park companies, in the sale of its European Division to Palamon Capital Partner;
• Starwood Hotels & Resorts on various matters, including a $250 million public bond offering, the acquisition and sale of multiple assets and properties worldwide, a $1 billion term loan refinancing, and structuring partnerships with two renowned restaurateurs, Alain Ducasse and Jean Georges Vongerichten, concerning hotel restaurant locations in New York, Atlanta, Istanbul and Doha;
• Sunterra Corporation in its $700 million sale to Diamond Resorts, LLC.
• Trump Entertainment Resorts in its chapter 11 filing with approximately $1.7 billion of debt. The company owns three Atlantic City casinos – Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza and Trump Marina.