Mike Leven (left) and IHG Americas President Jim Abrahamson announce Las Vegas Sands’ affiliation with IHG during the brand company’s convention last month in Las Vegas.

When Mike Leven took his current job as president and COO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. in March 2009, I wrote a blog item questioning his judgment. I’ve known Mike for many years so I took a few liberties in poking fun at his decision to join the rough-and-tumble world of casino hotels following nearly five very successful decades in the traditional hotel business. I figured it was a long-shot bet and wondered whether he would roll craps.

I’ve been proven wrong. Leven apparently made the right decision, even though he entered the gaming world at the height of its worst recession and even though he went to work for Sheldon Adelson, LVS’ reputedly volatile founder and chairman. I’ve followed the company closely since Leven joined its executive ranks and have kept track of its improving fortunes.

When Leven joined the company, its stock price hovered in the low $20 range. Today, it flirts with $50. And based on strong results in its Asian operations in Macao and Singapore, the company posted record revenues of $1.91 billion in the third quarter, with EBITDA rising 137 percent to more than $645 million. The company continues to grow with another 6,400 rooms under construction in four hotels in Macao.

But the wisdom of his decision really hit me last month when I saw Mike at the IHG Americas conference, which was being held at LVS’ flagship properties on the Las Vegas Strip, The Venetian and Palazzo. As a former president of Holiday Inn, Leven has a strong attachment to the brand and he showed up on the conference stage to jointly announce an affiliation agreement with IHG for his two Strip properties. The partnership is a coup for both parties, and Mike was beaming, in part I think because of the deal, but also because of the fun he’s having operating in LVS’ worldwide sphere.

It also helps that a few days after the IHG meeting Mike signed a two-year extension on his contract with LVS that will keep him in the executive suite at least until November 2012.

After the IHG conference, I caught up with Mike by phone to review his 18 months on the job and get his outlook for the company, Las Vegas and the casino hotel business:

How has this job energized you?
I hadn’t been energized very much for a while (before I took this job) so it gave me the opportunity to put into practice a lot of lessons I learned along the way, while working with great assets and great challenges. It’s been very satisfying so far.

Do you see a turnaround coming for Las Vegas?
It is moving forward, and in many ways it’s representative of what’s happening throughout the U.S. We’ll see some slow or moderate growth, but nothing spectacular. It will take a long time and if the trend continues we will catch up in a couple of years, but you won’t see massive growth in room rates for a while.

Visitation (to Las Vegas) was up two percent in October, but the number of rooms was up four percent so it’s hard to raise rates very much. The good news is we still have the convention business, and we’re doing quite well there. We’re going to have a big year for conventions in 2011. Not a lot of room rate (growth), but a lot of bodies. Sheldon (Adelson) used to say groups get a 40-percent increase in attendance when they meet in Las Vegas. I’m not sure it’s 40 percent anymore, but it certainly is an increase.

What has been satisfying about your time with LVS?
It’s been a wonderful experience and I’ve been very excited about it. We’ve made a lot of progress on the financial side of the business and we’ve made some major cost reductions. We’ve got a great future. I just got a note from (IHG Chairman) Andy Cosslett following the IHG conference that was very satisfying. (In part) he said, ”It was far and away the best conference I ever attended, with the best service and the best facilities and it seems everyone agrees.” That says what we are, and it makes me feel good, but we need to be even better on a lot of stuff and that’s my job in the next couple of years. The job is also to consolidate our gains and build the human culture to make the company sustainable.

How different is the casino business from traditional hotels?
There is great hubris among casino people. They think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread, and they’re totally insensitive to human beings working in the environment. They’re not as hospitable as are hotel people. But they’ve had their comeuppance here in Las Vegas in the last couple of years and there’s more to come. They deserve every bit of the pain as far as I am concerned.

Have you tried to change that mindset?
Where we do get great service is from the line hospitality employees and the line people in the casino. The hourly people are spectacular and do great jobs. But management in the casino business has never really given them the credit they’re due. There was a lot of over-staffing at the middle management levels. They didn’t need to be very economical or efficiency oriented except when it came to the compliance rules.

What has happened in the past couple of years will hopefully wake up the business to the fact that there is more to it than just running people through your casino. We’ve always (understood that fact) because we’ve been in the convention business so long.

I assume LVS is looking overseas for most of its growth, in Asia in particular.
We have potential in Europe and South America and we’re looking in both of those regions, but as a smaller contributor than what is in Asia. And we still continue to look in Asia. While we have a great footprint in Asia, there are opportunities in Japan and India and Taiwan and Korea that we’re investigating very seriously. And we may look at Panama or Spain as other alternatives. We hope things progress in Texas, and Dallas could be an opportunity for us, but there’s not much else in the U.S. for our kinds of facilities.

Does the fact that LVS is associated with Las Vegas hold a special cachet overseas?
I don’t know whether you can convert it to the bottom line, but Las Vegas is still the entertainment capital of the world. While it’s not viewed as Sin City anymore, it is viewed as a convention and leisure destination. Las Vegas will still draw 36 or 38 million visitors a year, but it’s a question of will they be the right visitors with the right spend to support the very expensive products that have been built in the last number of years.