Bye, Hard Rock Hotel. Hello, Virgin. Las Vegas hotel to close during changeover

If you want to stay at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, you'd better grab a room before fall. The storied site will close for about four months before it re-emerges as a Virgin Hotel in 2020.

Dates are still fuzzy on exactly when all of this will take place at the resort two miles east of the Strip at Harmon Avenue and Paradise Road.

“You’ve got one opportunity to really enter the market,” said Richard Bosworth, chief executive of JC Hospitality, which owns the property. “And we want to make sure that we’re doing that correctly and that we’re not piecemealing aspects of the property: a restaurant here, a hotel room there.”

Bosworth said keeping the hotel open during the transition would have been too disruptive for guests.

Virgin Hotels currently operates hotels in San Francisco and Chicago, with more planned. Renovated rooms will look like other Virgin hotels, with a design that’s “modern, contemporary, light and airy, authentic [and] welcoming,” Raul Leal, chief executive of Virgin Hotels, said.

The hotel’s popular music venue, the Joint, will remain, but also will be upgraded and maybe renamed. Rehab, the Hard Rock’s five-acre party pool area, closed last October and will be redeveloped prior to the 2020 reopening.

Bosworth said keeping the hotel open during the transition would have been too disruptive for guests.

Virgin Hotels currently operates hotels in San Francisco and Chicago, with more planned. Renovated rooms will look like other Virgin hotels, with a design that’s “modern, contemporary, light and airy, authentic [and] welcoming,” Raul Leal, chief executive of Virgin Hotels, said.

The hotel’s popular music venue, the Joint, will remain, but also will be upgraded and maybe renamed. Rehab, the Hard Rock’s five-acre party pool area, closed last October and will be redeveloped prior to the 2020 reopening.