Question of the Day - 18 September 2017

We posed this question to a long-time friend of LVA, Vegas veteran, and attendee of the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest convention in Las Vegas with upwards of 170,000 attendees and 3,600 exhibitors. 

He lives and works in Silicon Valley and has gone every year for, well, we’ve lost count. Money isn’t so much an object for him as the HASSLE FACTOR (he likes his keyboard caps lock for emphasis)—time, convenience, and ANNOYANCE.

One thing about his CES forays that he didn’t mention. He never stays at a hotel. He always stays at a VRBO in the neighborhoods and rents a car. Because he usually comes with a friend (a Google executive) and the friend’s son, a two-bedroom condo for four or five nights is extremely cost-effective for the three of them, when compared to how they’d get gouged by the casinos for two or three rooms during the largest convention of them all.

Here’s what he had to say.

This will be the first CES year where we'll have to actually pay for our standard CES Transport & Parking Optimization. That’s the Big Factor this year. So, I'll comment from the CES attendee perspective.

The SLS garage is free (so far), which is why I avoid it LIKE THE PLAGUE. The Westgate garage is NUTS during any large LVCC event, regardless of parking cost. And even with the Desert Inn Arterial, the shuttle bus and car traffic anywhere near the Convention Center is a TOTAL zoo.

The MGM self-park garage is a pain in the ass to get in and out of, in addition to being a long hike from the MGM monorail station. Also, during CES week, the MGM is a ZOO, especially for the Monorail, since so many CES attendees stay there. So, the MGM is out for those of us in the know.

Our strategy has always been to self-park at Bally's/Paris and take the Monorail to LVCC from there. You can get in and out of this garage quickly and the walk to the Monorail stop is, relatively speaking, very short.

Also, there are Monorail ticket machines at the bottom of the escalator in the casino on the walk to the monorail station. These are often bypassed by attendees. They usually use the ticket machines right at the entrance to the Monorail station. This means that the ones at the bottom of the Bally's casino escalator almost never have a line while there's usually a jam-up for the machines at the entrance to the Monorail.

So, the summary is that, if you're going to self-park and Monorail over to the LVCC, especially during any large event, Bally's/Paris is the place to do it from.