- March 14, 2025
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It’s about 10:30 on a cold, rainy Thursday morning in January. A car pulls off Interstate 4 onto Orient Road. Downtown Tampa’s skyline fills the horizon to the west.
Finding parking, the driver thinks, should be easy at this hour. Especially given these conditions.
But it’s not. And that’s because what the driver is looking for is a parking space in a garage at the Seminole Hard Rock Resort & Casino in Tampa. And what the driver is about to learn — the hard way — is that regardless of the time or weather the place is packed.
“Yeah, it always pretty crowded,” says Darien Cobb, the resort’s manager of public relations and community affairs. (Crowded enough that in slot machines alone the casino paid out $14.43 billion in winnings last year.)
Cobb is speaking to a group of invitees at the unveiling of $65 million in upgrades to the nearly 21-year-old property. The project includes the reopening of a popular buffet closed since the pandemic, a new gaming area with 350 slot machine and a remodeled 240-room hotel tower.
The upgrades, which came together in various stages but were revealed to the public at once, are the latest changes that have come to the Hard Rock since it opened in March 2004 with a Class 2 gaming license limiting the games it could offer.
In the nearly 21 years since the opening, the resort has continued to grow as an attraction, transforming itself from a curiosity to the type of destination that recently bought a helicopter to ferry high dollar gamblers back and forth from Orlando.
The changes include a 2010 agreement with the state that allowed for a Class 3 license, ushering in Las Vegas style games and a $700 million expansion in 2019 that brought in 200,000 square feet of space for games and entertainment, including 5,000 slot machines and almost 200 gaming tables.
The pièce de résistance of the 2019 project was the opening of a 15-story hotel tower that raised the total number of rooms available to 802.
Today, the resort's thundering, glittering, cavernous, smoked-filled casino floor features 5,230 slot machines, 168 table games, a poker room with 46 tables and 13 restaurants. It employs 4,293.
“We’ll keep adding here and there and upgrading where we can and doing what we do,” says Hard Rock Tampa President Steve Bonner.
The Seminole Tribe of Florida has been upgrading in Tampa for decades now.
The property, back in the early 1980s, was best known as the home of a drive-in smoke shop that sold, much to the chagrin of local officials, tax-free cigarettes off the interstate.
The property came to the tribe after workers excavating a $9.3 million, two-story parking garage on the site of the historic military post Fort Brooke in modern-day downtown Tampa discovered skeletal remains in 1980.
According to a June 25, 1980, story in the Tampa Tribune, an archeologist working for the state discovered four wooden boxes containing the remains of what was believed to be Seminole Indians. A year earlier, a man digging for bottles found an Indian necklace.
The city, according to the story, approved a contract for $36,400 to hire nine archeologists to remove any bodies discovered on the site.
The tribe eventually bought the land where the Hard Rock Tampa stands today in 1981 for $185,000. The property was to serve as a burial ground for the 144 Seminole bodies found on the Fort Brooke site.
The bodies, according to the tribe’s official newspaper The Seminole Tribune, were of prisoners waiting to be deported out west.
The U.S. Department of Interior accepted the land in trust after the purchase and granted it separate nation status. That, an attorney for the Seminole Indians told the Tampa Tribune in May 1981, allowed the tribe to sell tax-free cigarettes and open a bingo hall.
The smoke shop opened in July 1981 and the bingo hall opened in 1982, along with a cultural museum. In general, the Seminole Tribe, which opened a bingo hall in 1979 on its reservation in Hollywood, on Florida's east coast, looked to duplicate its success in Tampa.
Nearly a decade later, Hard Rock Cafe International Inc. announced it was going to build casinos on the Seminole land in Tampa and Hollywood. According to a 2001 story in the Los Angeles Times, the company said it was developing the properties with the tribe and Cordish Co. at a cost of $400 million.
The bingo hall in Tampa at the time was working with a low stakes gambling license that allowed it to operate simulated slot machines, low stakes poker and bingo.
The consensus at the time was partnering with the Hard Rock would allow the tribe, despite pushback from Florida leaders opposed to the expansion of gambling, to compete with those in Las Vegas, at least amenities wise.
(The Class 3 license would come in 2010 after the casino opened, allowing it to offer unlimited pots on slot machines, high stakes blackjack, poker and roulette. It happened when then-Gov. Charlie Crist s signed the Seminole Compact.)
The $100 million Tampa casino, which had grown to 37 acres, officially opened March 11, 2004 packed tight with rock and roll memorabilia, Elvis skydivers and a guitar smashing. While a spectacle at the time, with 250 hotel rooms and 1,200 slot machines it was a shadow of what visitors see today
But crowds were coming. According to a consultant who spoke to the Associated Press as the Hard Rock Hollywood was about to open several months later, the Tampa casino was drawing 20,000 people per day on weekends.
More than 20 years later, it continues to draw and is a major attraction in the area,
“In our organization it's all about people and having something that entices all people, either to move here, to want to live here, to visit here. Pick one,” says Santiago Corrada president and CEO of Visit Tampa Bay, the local convention and visitors bureau.
“In this case,” he says of the Hard Rock, “there's a clientele that loves gaming. That loves sports. That loves sports betting. That loves rock and roll memorabilia. That likes fine dining. I mean, there is something that appeals to everyone.”
But times haven’t always been good at the Hard Rock Tampa.
The resort shuttered in 2020 because of the pandemic.
“We never worked harder than when COVID hit,” says Bonner, “We shut it down and reopening was harder than building it.”
Bonner, who took over as president in 2018 and says running a casino is no different than running any other business — only louder — says it took a couple of years to fully bounce back from the pandemic.
One example of how tough it was is the Fresh Harvest Buffet. The popular eatery closed during COVID, and despite a desire to get it back open, the resort struggled to get it done for nearly five years.
Among the stumbling blocks: staffing issues, supply challenges and the fact that for some time during COVID, germ-aware diners worried about going to buffets.
The resort decided the time was right to reopen the Fresh Harvest about two months ago. And if that cold rainy day is any indication, it was the right decision. About 45 minutes before it was set to open, as Cobb was showing the invitees around the six live-action kitchens, a line was already forming.
While Bonner and the public relations team like to boast about the success of the Hard Rock, getting a clear financial picture of the resort’s operations is difficult.
The Hard Rock Tampa declined to disclose visitor or revenue numbers for this story. And because it doesn’t pay into the bed tax fund given its Seminole Compact status, the local visitors bureau isn’t able to collect room night data.
As for Bonner, he did not answer when asked about finances in an interview.
“I defer on revenue questions,” he says. “But let’s just say, this is one of the busiest casinos in the world.”
Despite the lack of answers, one may extrapolate about how well Hard Rock Tampa is doing based on how much it paid out to winners last year. Casinos of this magnitude, after all, aren’t built on the backs of people winning at the roulette table.
According to the resort, $14.43 billion in winnings from slot machines were paid out in 2024, including $2 billion in jackpots of $1,2000 or more.
Looking at those types of numbers it’s hard to imagine that just 30 years ago the 8.5 acres of tribal land the resort sits on housed a bingo hall and a cigarette shop.
And if the numbers aren't proof enough of its evolution, just try to find a parking spot.
