Hotels function as some of the most visually distinctive structures in any Grand Theft Auto setting, anchoring tourist economies, criminal hideouts and aspirational architecture in a single silhouette. In Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games, 2026), the return to Vice City — Rockstar's fictionalised Miami within the state of Leonida — brings with it an unmistakable hotel skyline along the equivalent of Collins Avenue, drawing on a century of Miami Beach resort architecture. The real-world references include the Morris Lapidus-designed Fontainebleau Miami Beach, the minimalist Asian-inspired The Setai, and the maximalist Argentine-flavoured Faena Hotel Miami Beach, all of which represent distinct eras of South Florida luxury that Rockstar has historically used as visual shorthand for wealth, vice and the criminal underbelly of paradise (Wikipedia, 2025a; Wikipedia, 2025b; Rockstar Games, 2025).
The Fontainebleau, opened on Collins Avenue in 1954, is the archetypal Miami Beach resort and was designed by Morris Lapidus in the curvilinear Miami Modern (MiMo) style (Wikipedia, 2025a). Its sweeping façade, "Staircase to Nowhere", and bow-tie floor inlays helped define mid-century Floridian glamour, and it remains owned by the Soffer family-controlled Fontainebleau Resorts after a billion-dollar renovation completed in 2008 (Luscombe, 2008). The property has appeared in Goldfinger (1964), Scarface (1983) and The Bodyguard (1992), cementing its status as a cinematic shorthand for Miami excess (Wikipedia, 2025a). For Rockstar, the Fontainebleau's combination of mob-era history, Rat Pack mythology and the documented use of a suite by the Black Tuna Gang in the 1970s makes it a natural template for in-game crime-adjacent luxury (Wikipedia, 2025a).
The Setai, located at 21st Street and Collins, fuses a restored Art Deco tower (the former Dempsey-Vanderbilt) with a contemporary 40-storey ocean-facing addition. Its aesthetic — black granite, Burmese teak, dim lighting and a courtyard of three temperature-graded pools — represents a counterpoint to Fontainebleau's flamboyance, embodying the early-2000s shift toward restrained, Asian-influenced luxury (The Setai, 2024). In a Vice City context, The Setai's silhouette resonates with the more austere, executive-grade towers visible in the GTA VI second trailer skyline shots, which suggest blocks of dark, vertically slatted condo-hotels among the Art Deco low-rises (Rockstar Games, 2025).
The Faena, opened in November 2015, occupies the historic 1948 Saxony Hotel — the first air-conditioned hotel on Miami Beach — designed by Roy F. France for banker George D. Sax (Wikipedia, 2025b). Following a wholesale renovation by Argentine developer Alan Faena, with creative direction from Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, the property reopened as a maximalist, red-and-gold theatrical resort featuring Damien Hirst's gilded woolly mammoth ("Gone but Not Forgotten") in its garden (Associated Press, 2017). The Faena's blend of Latin American capital, celebrity provenance and ostentation maps directly onto the Vice City fantasy of immigrant wealth laundered through hospitality.
Grand Theft Auto VI is set in Vice City, Grassrivers and the Leonida Keys — Rockstar's stand-ins for Miami, the Everglades and the Florida Keys — and the May 2025 second trailer prominently featured hotel and resort architecture in beach-strip establishing shots (Rockstar Games, 2025; BBC, 2025). Imagery released alongside the trailer included neon-fronted oceanfront towers reminiscent of Ocean Drive's Art Deco district as well as larger curved high-rises clearly echoing the Fontainebleau's signature curve (Game Informer, 2025). Rockstar's previous Vice City (2002) already featured the Ocean View Hotel (the protagonist's first safehouse) and parodied the Fontainebleau as part of its 1980s pastiche; GTA VI updates that lineage to the 2020s, where boutique hotels, condo-hotels and influencer-friendly pool clubs (paralleling LIV at the Fontainebleau) are integral to the satirised social-media culture the game depicts (Wikipedia, 2025c). Leaked 2022 footage and the official screenshots confirm interiors consistent with hotel lobbies, pool decks and rooftop bars, suggesting hotels will function as mission hubs, heist targets and safehouses much as casinos did in GTA V's Diamond Casino update (The Guardian, 2022; Rockstar Games, 2025).
Hotels in Vice City serve three narrative purposes: they signal economic stratification (the gulf between motel-dwelling drifters in the Keys and penthouse residents in Vice City), they provide spatially dense mission environments, and they encode the city's history of laundered money — a thematic continuity from Scarface through to the real Miami Beach property booms documented by Gaines (2009). The Fontainebleau/Setai/Faena triad gives Rockstar a ready-made vocabulary spanning mid-century MiMo, minimalist contemporary and maximalist neo-baroque, all within a few blocks of Collins Avenue.
Associated Press (2017) 'Neglected strip of Miami Beach gets glamorous makeover', AP News, 14 March. Available at: https://apnews.com/30408e4403a84c778e60c71372d7c2a2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
BBC (2025) 'What have we learned from Grand Theft Auto 6's second trailer?', BBC News, 6 May. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2grmrx4po (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Gaines, S. (2009) Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach. New York: Crown Publishers.
Game Informer (2025) 'Rockstar Shows Off Six Major Areas Of Vice City In Grand Theft Auto VI', Game Informer, 6 May. Available at: https://www.gameinformer.com/2025/05/06/rockstar-shows-off-six-major-areas-of-vice-city-in-grand-theft-auto-vi (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Luscombe, R. (2008) 'Hotel to the stars gets billion-dollar makeover', The Guardian, 22 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/nov/22/hotels-fontainebleau-miami (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Rockstar Games (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI – Trailer 2. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
The Guardian (2022) 'Rockstar owner issues takedowns after Grand Theft Auto VI leak', The Guardian, 19 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/19/rockstar-owner-issues-takedowns-after-grand-theft-auto-vi-leak (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
The Setai (2024) About The Setai Miami Beach. Available at: https://www.thesetaihotel.com/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) 'Fontainebleau Miami Beach'. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fontainebleau_Miami_Beach (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) 'Faena Hotel Miami Beach'. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faena_Hotel_Miami_Beach (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025c) 'Grand Theft Auto: Vice City'. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto:_Vice_City (Accessed: 14 May 2026).