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Intimate Venues, Massive City

Corporate groups are reaching new heights in their team-building endeavors.
By Rowland Stiteler

February 2009
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The sheer size of Las Vegas—with its mammoth hotels and conference centers—can sometimes be intimidating for small-group planners. The logic among those planners is that groups with fewer than 1,000 attendees could find themselves swallowed up in the vastness of it all—forgotten, and what’s worse, essentially ignored by the hotel playing host to their groups.

But according to Las Vegas-based planners, the idea of being ignored in this desert mega-destination just because your group doesn’t have an attendance larger than the population of Peoria, Ill., or Bakersfield, Calif., is a meeting and event industry myth—especially in the current economic environment. In fact, those planners say the individual attendee experience in small groups is as good as or better than that of individual attendees in large groups.

“You are going to get great attention from hotels and other venues in Las Vegas if you want to bring a small group here,” said Jennifer Espelien, sales and special events manager for Las Vegas-based CLI Groups Inc.—Convention, Leisure, Incentive DMC. “They actively want your business, and they are eager to work with you, especially these days.”

The current economic situation, local industry experts say, has made hotels even more eager to roll out the red carpet for small groups.

“In a challenging economic environment, the way you can distinguish yourself in the marketplace is by providing better service than your competitors,” said Michael Goldsmith, CMP, director of convention sales for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Association (LVCVA).

But it is not just a matter of the current economy that makes Las Vegas a fit for small groups, those involved in the industry in the city say. Another Las Vegas planner who does a lot of small-group business, Laura Travis, president of LT Eventions Inc., says that beyond the present economy’s obvious motivation for all hotels to reach out for all the business they can book, there is also bricks-and-mortar evidence that small group events represent part of the basic fabric of the business plans of even the largest properties.

“Throughout the big hotels, you’ll find lots of meeting rooms, private dining areas and other areas that were specifically designed to handle small events,” Travis said. “So it’s obvious they were thinking of both large groups and small groups when they built these places.”

Goldsmith also says small meetings are a permanent part of the economic fabric of the city’s meeting industry.

“Small meetings are big business in Las Vegas—that could be the headline for your article,” Goldsmith said. “In fact, we probably have more small meetings in Las Vegas than most convention destinations.”

Goldsmith pointed to a couple of statistics to illustrate his point.

Despite the mega-conventions of 100,000 attendees or more for which the city has become famous, about 75 percent of annual meeting convention attendance in Las Vegas is from meetings and events that draw 500 attendees or fewer.

And the LVCVA has three dedicated small meetings sales people, covering the U.S. West Coast, Midwest and East Coast—they do nothing but handle meetings of 99 attendees or fewer. Collectively the three generate one-third of all group business hotel leads the LVCVA generates each year.

“In addition to our dedicated small-meetings sales team and small-meetings convention services team, all of the major convention hotels in Las Vegas have them as well,” Goldsmith said. “So a planner should remember, when a hotel sales rep who only handles meetings for 100 attendees or less books your meeting and you have 80 attendees, that may be the biggest piece of business that representative is handling that week, so there is no way you are not going to have their focused attention.”

Several Las Vegas planners say that for a small event, it’s not a guaranteed lock that you are going to receive the same attention from a convention hotel that a planner with a 3,000-room-night piece of business is going to receive.

“You have to be realistic,” said Deborah Baker, director of sales for Las Vegas-based Extras, an event planning and management company. “A huge hotel with a huge amount of meeting space to fill is going to be most focused on the meetings that do the best job of filling that space.”

But Baker, like others in the Las Vegas planner community, recommends a strategy for planners looking for the right fit for a small group. She favors using both smaller hotels, where a small group can obviously make a big splash, and larger hotels with dedicated space for small groups and a reputation for welcoming 100-attendee events.

“I just took a group of 75 to the Flamingo, for instance, and the hotel was very happy to see them,” she said. “And it worked out great. The quality of the services was the same you’d receive in any of the major convention hotels in town.”

Ryan Legue, executive producer and director of sales for Las Vegas-based DAV Productions, says the time of year that a small group wants to book matters—with the busy January and February high season dominated by huge conventions not necessarily the best time for small groups. And he recommends checking to see what other groups are in the house for the time slot one’s small group is seeking to book.

“If there is a single huge group in the hotel taking up 95 percent of its space at the same time your group is there, the big group is going to have its signage everywhere in the hotel and more or less dominate the atmosphere of the place,” he said. “So you should definitely check to see what else is in the hotel at the time you are considering and see if it is going to be compatible your group.”

Jaki Baskow, CMP, CEO of Las Vegas-based Baskow & Associates, says small groups have an advantage booking in the city because it’s a lot easier find venues within the big hotels, restaurants and bars that are far too small to handle an entire large group, but can easily handle a group of 100 or 200.

“With a small group, for instance, you can find a fine-dining room that is only open for dinner and book it for a private lunch function for your group,” she said.

Baskow also likes renting penthouse and presidential suites at hotels for small, high-end groups.

“You are going to have a spectacular view from the suite,” she said. “And they are typically large enough that your entire group can fit into it for a meeting, a luncheon, a dinner or a cocktail party or any combination of those functions.”

Bakow recently held such an event at the new Red Rock Casino, Spa and Resort in the One 80 Penthouse Suite, so named because it has a 180-degree view that includes the nearby Red Rock Mountains in one direction and the city of Las Vegas in the other, offering spectacular window-gazing day or night.

Ultimately, Baskow says, the small-group planner’s best asset in the vast Las Vegas market is knowledge—an insider’s perspective of all the best spots for small group events.