Las Vegas Vacation Blog Blog

Despite problems associated with the Electric Daisy Carnival last year in Los Angeles, including the death of a 15-year-old girl, Mayor Oscar Goodman is expecting the event to be a success this year as it moves to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Goodman gave the June 24-26 electronic music festival and rave a hearty endorsement Thursday during his weekly news conference at City Hall — and even indicated he might show up at the event, which was essentially booted out of LA.

The EDC, which is in its 15th year, will include 200 performers and artists throughout the weekend and is expected to draw more than 250,000 people, making it North America’s largest electronic music festival, Goodman said.

“It’s going to be phenomenal,” Goodman said.

One dollar of each ticket is going to be split among three local charities: the Clark County Community Partnership Program, the Smith Center for Performing Arts and the Injured Police Officers Fund, he said.

Goodman said the three-day festival will provide a carnival-like atmosphere, featuring dancers, fire twirlers, aerialists and stilt walkers, plus 28 carnival rides and attractions.

The event will feature six performance stages, state-of-the-art lighting and sound production, plus fireworks, Goodman said.

“We’re going to declare June 20-26 Electric Daisy Carnival Week in the City of Las Vegas and ask all of our citizens to support this monumental event,” Goodman said.

The mayor also introduced the EDC event’s top official, Pasquale Rotella, the CEO and founder of Insomniac Events.

Rotella said the show was beginning to set up production at the speedway this week.

“EDC is a lot more than a music festival,” Rotella said. “There’s a lot going on, aside from the international performers that we have coming on the stages. We have a lot of theatrical performers and walkabouts throughout the festival. And art is a big part of this festival.”

Those attending will see unique art pieces set up between the six performance stages, he said.

“The Las Vegas Motor Speedway was picked because it couldn’t be better equipped to handle the mass gathering,” Rotella said.
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Professional travel agents looking for new revenue streams and value-added services for clients will benefit from a new partnership between Base Entertainment and Leisure Pops, LLC, which will offer agents commissionable entertainment ticketing for booking Las Vegas shows.

The new program will be launched at the Outside Sales Support Networks (OSSN) conference in Las Vegas, which takes place from May 2 to 4 at the Venetian Palazzo and will be followed by briefings to travel agents who are attending other Las Vegas-based events later this year. This includes Vacation.com’s conference, Virtuoso’s annual meeting, Signature Travel Network’s conference, ASTA’s annual congress and the Luxury Travel Expo.

The new program offers agents one-click ticketing for a diverse portfolio of Las Vegas entertainment options managed by Base Entertainment. This includes hit shows such as “Phantom – The Las Vegas Spectacular,” “Jersey Boys,” “Peepshow, Starring Holly Madison” and “Absinthe.”

Michelle Sharples, director of group sales for base entertainment told Travel Agent that she sees the new partnership as an opportunity for agents to earn new revenues from the sale of shows and events for Las Vegas-bound leisure or corporate travelers booking FIT, VIP and group tickets.

“We have always seen travel agents as a key market but, now, the technology provided by Leisure Pops will allow fast, easy, seamless booking and prompt commission payment,” said Sharples. “It opens opportunities for agents to earn revenue and serve clients with an appealing service to a top destination.”

The new integrated technology will also allow Base Entertainment to market directly to agents, agency consortiums and hosts, Sharples noted.

“Entertainment sales can prove to be a new revenue stream and the ability to offer the service enhances the agents value to their clients for both individual and group bookings,” she said.

Commission levels start at 10 percent and, based upon volume, agents can reach commission levels that are as high as 15 percent. With an average ticket price estimated at more than $120, booking a vacationing couple with a show in Vegas can earn an agent more than $36 in commission, Sharples noted.

To take advantage of the new selling tools, agents can install Leisure Pops and turn on the Base Entertainment Pop Campaign. Leisure Pops will then “pop” upon completion of reservations into Las Vegas and enable the agent to seamlessly and quickly make show reservations. There is no cost for bookings. The Base Pop campaign goes live in May 2011

Leisure Pops itself is a point-of-sale, merchandizing software application runs in the background on an agent’s desktop and then “pops” or reminds an agent, via a pop-up message, of relevant opportunities from both the GDS and the Web to better serve their client, as well as make more commissions. The company’s president is Lee Rosen, who is best known as the founder of TRAMS.

While the Leisure Pops software normally costs agents $10 per month, those agents who sign up with the Base Entertainment program will receive Leisure Pops for free, indefinitely.

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The U.S. dance music festival that ended in chaos last year after more than 100 revellers were admitted to hospital after fans scrambled to gain access has moved to Las Vegas.

Organisers of the Electric Daisy Carnival were heavily criticized following the event at the Memorial Coliseum and Exposition Park in Los Angeles, which was headlined by Moby.

Official reports suggest many of the fans injured were caught as crowds rushed the gates and barriers in a bid to force their way into the event, which 185,000 music fans attended.

The promoters, Insomnia, have since hired Investigative Advisory Group, a consulting firm that has experience creating overall safety and security protocols for large venues, to analyze their current and proposed safety protocols and procedures for the company’s music festivals throughout the U.S.

They also established an ‘18 and older’ policy for all its dance music festivals after a 15-year-old reveller died from a drug overdose at the festival.

And they’re not letting the events of last year’s festival halt plans for a 2011 bash - this year’s Electric Daisy Carnival will be held at Las Vegas Motor Speedway over the final weekend in June.

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Mobster Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, infamous for his brutality, once reportedly squeezed a man’s head in a vice until his eyes popped out of their sockets.

But when he wasn’t carrying out brutal interrogations or fulfilling contract killings — duties required of him as a made man for the mob — he was playing the role of dutiful father.

Spilotro and other mobsters with a Las Vegas connection all had softer, gentler sides that have rarely been acknowledged, says Jay Bloom, founder and managing partner of the Las Vegas Mob Experience at the Tropicana.

Bloom hopes the new attraction changes that by showing publicly the soft guy side that Spilotro, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Sam Giancana, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky possessed.

The Las Vegas Mob Experience celebrated its grand opening Wednesday. It is not to be confused with the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, popularly known as the Mob Museum, which is scheduled to open later this year in downtown Las Vegas.

The Mob Museum will concentrate more on the law enforcement perspective, says Michael Unger, chief executive officer of Eagle Group Holdings, the parent company of the Mob Experience, while “we will focus on the bad guys.”

The “show-seum is a little bit entertainment, a little bit excitement and a little bit history all rolled together,” Unger says. “We expose the human side of these men, if you will. Siegel was a great father. Same thing with Spilotro. They were good family men.”

Several family members of the infamous men, including Millicent Siegel Rosen, daughter of Siegel; Spilotro’s son, Vincent, and his widow, Nancy; Meyer Lansky II and Cythina Duncan, grandchildren of Lansky; and Giancana’s grandson, Carl Manno, donated or loaned more than 1,500 artifacts to be displayed. Among them are Spilotro’s baby shoes and his handguns; Siegel’s home movies, furniture and love letters; and Lansky’s golf clubs and personal diaries.

“It’s quite a showcase,” says 80-year-old Rosen. “People have been after me for years to do something about my father, but I never wanted to get involved in anything. But when I met Jay, his ideas were different. I was very impressed with the way he treated my father.”
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Viva the New Year!

In what was sure to be one of the most star-studded concerts of the year, Jay-Z and Coldplay rocked Las Vegas on New Year’s Eve, performing at the grand opening of The Cosmopolitan, a $3.9 billion hotel on the famous Strip.

But those two acts weren’t the only ones to take the stage: Beyoncé, Kanye West and John Mayer all made surprise appearances during Jay-Z’s performance.

Beyoncé joined her husband for “Forever Young” and sang “Halo” with Chris Martin. Mayer played guitar with Jay-Z on his hit song “99 Problems.”

“All the problems you were going through have been kicked out the door,” Jay-Z told the crowd before a collaborative performance of West’s “Homecoming,” which featured Jay-Z, West and Martin.

Gwyneth Paltrow was also on hand to watch the show – and ring in the 2011 with her husband and close friends.

The intimate crowd was littered with celebrities to witness the show that Jay-Z called “once in a lifetime.” Following their Mexican vacation, Cameron Diaz and Alex Rodriguez were spotted in the audience. Diaz spent some of the evening chatting with Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, not far from Ellen Pompeo and Blake Lively.

Before the concert Pompeo said she doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions, but she has a goal for the year, which is “being happy every day.”

Pompeo added, “I have a great job, a great husband, a great baby. I have a lot to be thankful for all the time.”

Following the concert, the stars headed to Marquee Las Vegas where famed DJ Erick Morillo entertained the crowd.

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After more than a year of lethargic convention attendance in Las Vegas, the meetings and trade show industry will regain much of its health in 2011.

Southern Nevadans can thank rebounding corporate profits, a relentless convention sales force and that irksome volcano in Iceland for putting the local industry on the road to recovery.

Using 2007 as a benchmark — the year Las Vegas saw a record 6.2 million conventiongoers — next year’s visitor numbers are expected to reach levels on par with late 2005 or early 2006 in the run-up to those glory days.

After stellar 2007, convention traffic tanked.

The recession hit Las Vegas in August 2008 when convention traffic fell 22.3 percent from the same month a year earlier. There were double-digit percentage declines in four of the 12 months of 2008, even though the annual decrease was just 5 percent.

In 2009, convention traffic was off 23.9 percent for the year and August 2009 was down a stunning 58.9 percent from that ugly August 2008 number.

“We didn’t just ease into it,” said Chris Meyer, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority vice president of sales. “It went right off the cliff in 2008, and it stayed that way for several months.”

The crash was a byproduct of the Great Recession as companies retreated from travel. Local experts are convinced that a recovery didn’t begin immediately because of President Barack Obama’s remarks about spending economic stimulus money on corporate junkets.

“It had a chilling effect for the entire industry, but it may have hurt us more because we got singled out,” Meyer said. “A lot of companies and organizations said they felt horrible about canceling their events here, but they also said, ‘When we get a chance to rebook, we’re calling you first.’ ”

Jan Freitag, vice president of global development for STR, a travel research company based in Hendersonville, Tenn., said the dive in corporate travel wasn’t just a Las Vegas phenomenon.

In fact, in more cases than not, Freitag said, Las Vegas defies conventional travel trends.

“There are three basic trends we’re watching,” he said. “Nationwide, the growth rate of new hotel rooms has decreased. Las Vegas has almost always been an exception to the market in that area.”

The second trend, he said, is that room demand is up. For the first 10 months of 2010, the total number of rooms sold was up 7.6 percent from the previous year.

In Las Vegas, room sales were up 3.3 percent during that time, although room inventory was up 4.6 percent, thanks primarily to the opening of CityCenter and new towers at the Hard Rock Hotel, Golden Nugget and Planet Hollywood in 2009.
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“Top Chef” fans, you are in for a treat. Bravo was kind enough to sneak me an advance look at tonight’s Restaurant Wars episode, and you can expect shakeups galore. All of them for the better. Please note: What follows has minor spoilers. Proceed at your discretion.

Rick Moonen (you watched him implode and then make one of the greatest comebacks ever on “Top Chef Masters”) is in to guest judge the series’ first-ever tag-team cook-off. The remaining eight contestants will split into two teams, each which will be responsible for creating a single dish relay-race style — only without communication and with blindfolds.

Each chef will get 10-minute chunks of time to cook. While the first chef is cooking, the other three must wait blindfolded — the blindfold doesn’t come off until it is that person’s turn. No talking about the dish beforehand or otherwise.

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Las Vegas’ UFL team has repriced tickets at its home games to $10 dollars for all but the most prime seats.

The Locomotives previously priced tickets from $7 to $42, and sold 12,000 tickets for their home opener last week.

The Locos play at Sam Boyd Stadium, which is also the site for the UFL championship Nov. 27.

The Tropicana Las Vegas presents American Funk, Rock and R&B Legends - WAR - Tuesday, Dec. 30 at 8 p.m. in the Tiffany Theater. Tickets are priced at $50 and $60 (all inclusive) and are available at the Tropicana Box Office.
WAR has entertained audiences for more than three decades with favorites: “Low Rider,” “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” “Cisco Kid,” “Spill the Wine” and many more. Spreading a message of unity and understanding, their repertoire of music proves ever timeless with continual success; WAR was recently nominated for induction into the 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
In addition to an evening of classic music the Tropicana Las Vegas is also offering incredible room rates for the New Year’s Eve holiday starting as low as $143 per night for three nights and $189 per night for Dec. 30 and Dec. 31.
“We are very excited to kick-off our New Year’s Eve festivities with such an accomplished group of performers,” said Tropicana Las Vegas Vice President of Marketing Randy Sears. “We’re providing our guests with fine entertainment, affordable prices and the ideal Las Vegas Strip location to ring-in the New Year.”

Tickets for WAR are available at the Tropicana Box Office or by calling 702-739-2411. For additional information on WAR as well as Tropicana Las Vegas New Year’s Eve holiday pricing visit tropicanalv.com.

I think one of the coolest sites to see in Las Vegas is the Fountains at the Bellagio. It truly is mesorizing to see at night time.

These fountains, also generally called musical fountains, appear to respond to music but have been programmed beforehand. The earliest of these were played manually by a live operator, who usually controlled pumps or valves and sometimes lights by way of switches on a control panel. Music was almost always live. Later, choreography could be prerecorded on a punched paper card which was scanned by a computer; and even later, it could be recorded on magnetic tape or, in the most modern shows, on a CD along with the music. Even so, the choreography must still be painstakingly programmed by hand, some types of shows being played live from a control console and connected to a computer that records the operator’s actions for later automatic playback.
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