Next month, Caesars Casino Entertainment plans to start laying the foundation for a 550-foot monster observation wheel behind the Imperial Palace and Flamingo hotels that it hopes to open toward the end of 2013.

Bigger than the 443-foot-tall London Eye , the wheel, dubbed the High Roller (good name!) might just give the Las Vegas Strip a welcome boost as the tourist destination (although I can’t see the vew being quite so spectacular as the London version).

Las Vegas has been going through something of an upturn of late, with over 15 months of increases in visitor numbers.

Gambling revenue for the Strip in June was about 7% up from June 2008 although hotel occupancy remains low (due to the increased supply of rooms).

The giant wheel will be the star attraction of a quarter-mile-long, $550 million, open-air casino entertainment complex called the Linq, with shops, restaurants, bars and nightclubs.

Around 9,000 hotel rooms have opened in the city during the downturn in projects such as City Center and the Cosmopolitan. And Las Vegas has lost its mantle as the world’s gambling capital to Macau in the meantime. But in terms of entertainment, the desert city has no equals and this new wheel will only widen the gap.

The High Roller’s 32 mega cabins will have space for forty passengers each, so customers can have birthday parties, stag parties (hmmm- not sure about this one. 40 minutes of seeing 15 blokes dressed up in Elvis suits pulling moonies from their pods?) or even weddings during the 30-minute ride. Passengers will even be able to play their own music in the cabins.

The Caesars project shows Caesar’s confidence that Las Vegas will keep on growing as an entertainment hub.

Sounds great! I’ve been on the London Eye and it was fantastic. I’ll be definitely giving this a spin when it opens…