ICED OUT: No More Cosmopolitan Las Vegas Ice Rink
Posted on: November 9, 2025, 04:20h.
Last updated on: November 9, 2025, 05:54h.
If you were wondering why the Cosmopolitan hasn’t announced its holiday ice rink yet, it has — on an auction site.
The news — scooped by the “Five Hundy by Midnight” podcast — appears to signal the end for the annual tradition.
Iced Out
Every holiday season since 2011, the Cosmo has slapped a 4,200 square-foot rink over its fourth-floor Boulevard Tower pool, transforming it into a rooftop wonderland with real ice, fire pits, snow showers and themed cocktails.
The announcement of its opening usually falls between October 25 and November 5, with the rink opening around Thanksgiving weekend.
But this year, the rink, furniture and skates are scheduled to hit the block at biddergy.com.
Also included in the auction are the rink walls, a full temporary plumbing grid for the antifreeze that helps make the ice, and even the Zamboni! (According to biddergy.com, it “drives but needs maintenance.”)
The listing states that the system, stored in a Las Vegas warehouse, will need “approximately 5 semi trailers to move.”
The year after it opened in December 2023, the Fontainebleau Las Vegas began copycatting the Cosmo by covering its third-floor pool deck with its own 7,500-foot Oasis Ice Rink.
This year, that ice rink will be the only one open to the public on the Las Vegas Strip.
Oh, and Wynn and Resorts World, just in case you’re reading this, thinking about opening your own ice rink on the cheap next holiday season, the auction site stipulates that the “system cannot be sold / utilized within Clark County, NV.” (Nice touch, MGM!)
The bidding starts at $5,000 at 5 a.m. PT November 24 at biddergy.com.
Here’s the full inventory list:
- Ice rink walls for 115’ x 48’ Rink (spares included)
- 10 Rolling Racks for Ice Skates (estimated 100 per rack of various sizes)
- 1 Additional pallet of Skates unracked
- 1 Skate Sharpener
- 5 pallets of Plastic Reindeer and Seals to aid learning skaters
- 1 pallet of insulation padding
- 5 Glycol Tanks and 1 Large Glycol Tank
- 2 Rolling Tool Crates with Chiller Plumbing fasteners and fittings
- 8 Pallets of Rubber Mats in assorted sizes. Used for safely walking with skates (est. 400+ Mats)
- 1 Zamboni, drives but needs maintenance
- 2 Storage Cubbies for shoes
- 4x pallets of benches (18 total)
- 4x pallets of stacked chairs (est. 16 chairs per pallet)
- 8x pallets of assorted outdoor furniture
- 3x pallets of Chalet Adirondack chairs
MGM Resorts, which has operated the Cosmo since 2022, did not immediately respond to Casino.org’s questions about why it’s selling the rink and if it intends to use the space for anything else this winter.
Last Comment ( 1 )
Another "brilliant" cost-saving move by the bean-counters running things these days. The skating rink generated lots of positive public-relations but probably didn't recoup the costs associated with running it. The thought of charging $27 for a cup of Swiss Miss hot cocoa probably would have generated lots of negative social media posts. So instead of keeping a popular loss-leader, MGM took the chicken-sh*t approach and just pulled the plug on the whole thing, hoping people wouldn't notice. Yet this same MGM will dump millions of dollars on the F1 atrocity - but couldn't spare a few pennies to keep the rink running. A fitting example of why everything on the Strip sucks these days. Even without the factoring in the current political and economic conditions, the Strip was already driving away middle-market visitors. Now the circling around the drain has increased in velocity. If F1 stepped up and partnered with MGM to rejuvenate the rink and ensure that it would be operating annually for the next few years, it may have generated a small bit of positive PR for the locals that despise every last lap of that months-long egotistical interruption to everyday life. The MBAs running things at MGM (and Caesars, Resorts, and Fontainebleau) may have tons of book-smarts, but have less of a grasp on human nature than Sheldon Cooper does. Sad, but hardly surprising.