AN UNEXPECTED TRIP TO LAS VEGAS

Last month, I unexpectedly found myself at Heathrow ready to board a flight of more than 10 hours to Las Vegas.

To my astonishment, a feature that I’d done for SME Today about a business man called Adam Taylor had captured the attention of tech giant Oracle. In that article, I spoke to Adam about the tech on which his business sits – called NetSuite or Oracle NetSuite. If you want to see that article it’s here – https://www.smetoday.co.uk/in-profile/the-pet-food-entrepreneur/

I’d never heard of NetSuite  (I now know a lot more about it now and it’s actually 25 years old). Adam felt it was fantastic tech which is flexible and responsible to his growing business which is well on its way to a turnover of around £100m.

As a result of that article, I was invited to attend SuiteWorld 2023 over three days in Las Vegas and Oracle footed the bill ie. the flight, transfers, hotel etc to get me there. I was not paid for my time to attend so I was free to write freely. It was too good an opportunity to miss.

Like most people I had an idea about Las Vegas and, frankly, it was not a place I’d have put on any travel bucket list. What I actually experienced was so overwhelming and all consuming that it will take weeks to build it into my consciousness.

Las Vegas means ‘the meadows’ and it is the gambling capital of the world. It is often called Sin City – though to be fair that term is related to a certain part of it during its hey day in the 1940s. It’s a desert city which has been built around hedonistic pursuits – gambling, alcohol, sex, love, music, entertainment and food.

When you arrive at the airport, you get no sense of that. You do feel the heat certainly compared with the UK, and we headed for the taxi rank and here is my first tip.

#Don’t book an Uber or a private cab for airport transfers. The rate is set by the local government here so use a standard cab so that you pay the fixed fee (at the time we visited) $22 plus tip. We did get an Uber back to the airport just because it was so convenient – it cost $28 plus tip.

#This leads to another point. Everything, and I mean everything involves a tip or tax at the till. The price on anything from drinks to food to goods is not the price you will pay. Taxes are added on at the till and tips are expected in almost every scenario from 15 to 25 per cent routinely.

Arriving along the strip is like an assault on every sense, especially if you arrive when it’s dark. It’s so lit up, so vibrant, so full of massive adverts and the noise is untrue. I thought New York was loud – it’s nothing like Las Vegas. The hotels are so huge that aircraft coming to the busy airport fly lower than the hotel blocks, helicopters fill the skies as tourists are flown around the Strip all day and most of the night. Silence is hard to come by here.

The people on the streets are overwhelming and I don’t really mind crowds. You can’t easily cross the streets. The road is about ten lanes across and you can’t just cross where you like – it’s deadly. You have to find crossings where it’s safe with signals telling you when to go and then there’s a countdown in seconds before the traffic moves. That traffic is unforgiving.

Also during the evenings you see people – beautiful people – all dressed up to entice you into bars, hotels and clubs. Beautiful men and women, dressed up or dressed with very little and they will pose for photographs with you and then expect you to pay for that. The most intriguing were the girls who walk wearing very little, whipping men in return for dollars. I’m not kidding, they do carry whips. They seemed to be doing good trade. Nothing quite beat Elvis on his mobility scooter drinking ice tea though.

#Here’s another tip. We made the mistake of booking stuff before we arrived such as trips and bus passes. DON’T DO THIS. It’s almost always cheaper when you get here. For example there is a bus service called Deuce – used by local people which is $8 for a 24 hour pass and you can jump on an off all day up and down the strip. A three day pass is $20. Also there are touts up and down the Strip selling cheaper tickets for trips and for shows, so don’t book before you go – you’ll end up spending more. The only exception would be the A lister shows where they can be fully booked for weeks – when we went this was Adele and U2 who were in the newly-opened Sphere.

With all of this information, you can begin to imagine how vast this conference was going to be. It was huge – held in a building called Caesar’s Forum Conference Centre which is completely separate to Caesar’s Palace Hotel and Caesar Forum shops. No wonder I got lost.

Thousands had booked to attend and to me it felt like they were all there. How many people actually turned up I don’t know. It was utterly bonkers. In all I’ve written four stories about my trip from a business point of view.

They are here:

https://www.smetoday.co.uk/news/smetoday-goes-to-vegas/

https://www.smetoday.co.uk/news/ai-central-to-the-growth-and-development-of-netsuite/

https://www.smetoday.co.uk/technology/meet-jason-kencevski/

https://www.smetoday.co.uk/features/esg-predictions-for-2024-from-netsuites-esg-expert/

Read on next week for some more experiences!

*In my next blog, I’ll talk about our hotels in Vegas.