Depending on whether you stay four hours or longer, valet parking is going to add $5 to $8 to your daily parking tab at an MGM casino-hotel. Even before he rolled out the pay-for-parking regime, an irritable MGM Resorts International CEO Jim Murren was saying customers should suck it up. "I’m not really sympathetic to somebody that says ‘I want everything free’ when we’re the ones spending the capital to build the amenities that are to the benefit of the tourists and the locals," he told Vegas Inc.
What parking valets may not have realized at the time was that MGM had big plans for them, too … outsourcing them en masse to Chicago-based service provider SP+. The only ones still under the MGM umbrella are the attendants at Luxor, Excalibur, and Circus Circus, who all have Teamsters Union representation. According to MGM’s Gordon Absher, that has been the case since those three casinos opened and the contract predates MGM’s 2005 acquisition of Mandalay Resort Group (which built all three casinos). MGM told the Las Vegas Review-Journal it was dickering with the Teamsters to "determine whether operational changes will be made."
All other MGM parking valets were offloaded onto SP+, which will administer the garages and pay the valets. Accrued seniority will be honored, as will MGM’s rate of pay, health benefits, and vacation pay. How many of the approximately 400 valets affected by the change will be retained by SP+ remains to be seen. SP+ didn’t respond to a query from LVA and replied to an MGM question on the matter with an icy, "Out of respect for the privacy of all concerned parties, by policy we do not comment publicly on the terms and conditions of our relationship with our employees."
According to Salary.com, a valet parker can expect to make a base salary of anywhere from $18,000 to $29,000 a year. Add in tips and that number can go as high as $70,000 per annum. Trump International valet Jordan Jackson told the R-J that he averaged $150 a night in tips – and on the graveyard shift, to boot. "Most locals will go two or three dollars, tourists will tip five because that’s what blogs tell them to do. It’s not uncommon for me to get tips in the hundreds range, though. It’s Las Vegas – we’re a city of high rollers," another valet told the R-J.
When it comes to the "appropriate" level of tipping, most consumer message boards – and Business Insider -- have arrived at a consensus that $2 to $3 is the apt amount -- $5 if you’re feeling "george." Valet parking attendant Ed Ryder told ABC News that a $1 tip is beyond the pale. "Two dollars is ... cheap. Three dollars is better. Four dollars is appreciated more. Five dollars is great. Ten dollars is lavish. Twenty dollars is making our day." (Wikihow says a $5-$10 tip is appropriate ... but with the caveat "if the service is complimentary.")
It will also more than double what you’re paying to valet-park your car at an MGM resort, so we don’t expect many $20 tips to be handed out. If you tip your parking valet using the same 15 percent-to-20 percent scale used for waiters, then $3 will be the minimum appropriate. In any event, MGM’s new policy turns an impulsive gesture into a cost-benefit analysis. Consumer message boards that are debating the new MGM policy fall roughly into two schools of thought. One is the "I’m never going to stay at MGM again" faction, while the other prevalent attitude can be summed up as, "You have to pay everywhere else in the U.S., so deal with it." There’s not much of a quorum for "Thank you, MGM, for making me pay for parking." At any rate – pardon the pun – now that valet parking, including tip, will add approximately $10 to the cost of parking your car, we recommend the (slightly) wallet-friendlier, do-it-yourself approach.
