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I had an absolutely horrible stay at The Mirage in December. I’ve stayed almost exclusively at The Mirage for the last 10 years and at MGM properties for the last 20. I had serious issues in December with the hotel mishandling my credit card, rude service at the Mlife desk, and my room was in such bad condition I couldn’t believe I was at a major Strip property. I'm looking to stay elsewhere on my next trip. My question is how much autonomy does each of the hotel casinos have within the MGM corporate structure? If there's a notable lack of service and upkeep at one hotel, is it the result of poor management at the very top or poor management at that particular hotel?
During the tenure of then-CEO J. Terrence Lanni, then-MGM Mirage was in the practice of "siloing" its properties, encouraging them to operate autonomously and compete with one another.
But when current CEO Jim Murren took over, he horizontally integrated management of hotel operations, at least that's been our impression. His decision reportedly to led to the departure of a number of hotel chiefs, including Felix Rappaport, who later became CEO of Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut, a position he held until his sudden death last month.
Since MGM Resorts International, as it's now called, was loath to answer your question, we asked a couple of industry experts, both of whom disagreed with our contention that the management of MGM Resorts' resorts is horizontal, rather than vertical.
Spectrum Gaming Group’s Michael Pollock was surprised by this complaint about the Mirage. He responded, “Certainly, in my experience, MGM is an industry leader. [The Mirage] would seem to be an outlier.”
We also contacted Clyde Barrow, president of Pyramid Associates. “What an interesting question,” he responded. “My experience in talking with casino employees in both Las Vegas and Atlantic City is that within the large casino companies with multiple ‘brands,’ each casino hotel stands on its own and actually competes against the facilities operating within the same umbrella. For example, Harrah’s [Resort] competes against Caesars in Atlantic City even though both are owned by the same company. The Mirage will be competing against Luxor. The result is that each hotel (or at least each brand) is attempting to establish its own identity and to outperform facilities owned by the same company. This means that each casino hotel has a considerable amount of autonomy with regard to local operations. I would say to your reader that this was a failure of local management.”
On the one hand, the Mirage is the second-oldest of MGM’s Strip properties — although nowhere so antediluvian as Circus Circus — thus likely to be at the low end of the food chain when it comes to staffing and maintenance. Formerly one of the Strip’s premier resorts, it has slipped into the mid-price category.
On the other hand, it's still able to command a $159-per-night price (as of this writing in mid-July), higher than Caesars Entertainment hotels were charging.
So it's a bit of a mystery to us why Mirage staffing and service were so poor at the time of your visit. We can only hope that someone at MGM corporate gets your memo and takes it up with whichever vice president is responsible for the Mirage.