Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 20, 1994 TAG: 9403220009
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: F-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CHRISTOPHER REYNOLDS LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LAS VEGAS LENGTH: Long
Which should be fine, because if anybody is in the business of massive quantities, it's the people behind the green-tinted glass at the MGM Grand Hotel, Casino & Theme Park. Among Las Vegas' three new megahotels, the Luxor sphinx across the street may exude more hotel-mascot magnetism, and Treasure Island down the block may collect greater sidewalk crowds with its marauding pirates and sinking ship. But these 5,005 rooms make the MGM Grand the largest hotel in the world. Under the same roof, the largest casino pulsates with 3,500 slot machines, a 15,200-seat arena is just down the hall and 33 acres of theme park wait beyond the back door. Just a few months after their Dec. 18 opening, the MGM's operators say they are routinely renting 4,000 rooms, serving 20,000 meals and grossing something like $1.6 million per day. In a city that lives by numbers, these are figures to reckon with.
How does such a place handle all the little things that go into making a guest happy? By gambling, of course. The house bets that about 350 maids per shift can keep up with turnover of 1,500 or more rooms daily. It puts up 38 windows at the reception desk and hopes that 500 guests don't step up simultaneously. It assigns nine order-takers and 50 waiters and waitresses at a time to handle room service on a busy day, and prays that they don't get 2,000 breakfast requests at once.
Mostly, the house wins. But when the house loses, its guests do, too, and in the shakedown of the MGM Grand's first few months, there have been many losses. Even Barbra Streisand - who might have been expected to keep quiet, considering the millions she was being paid - spiced up her New Year's Eve concert here with quips about the shortcomings of her quarters. The next morning, insiders say, things got worse: 2,000 room-service orders came in between 6 and 11 a.m. Service elevators broke down. A computer went down. A dishwasher went blooey. The wait for room service stretched from the usual half an hour to two hours and beyond. When the hotel's food people talk about that morning, they have the look of soldiers who have seen awful, awful carnage.
Too many mornings like that and the MGM will begin to look like a billion-dollar bad bet. Conversely, if the place can consistently keep so many guests and gamblers satisfied, it deserves to be studied as a wonder of American ingenuity.
And so, on the fifth weekend in the young lion's life, I stepped down its throat to see what goes on in the belly of the beast.
The lion is the hotel's public face on The Strip, but for many guests, parking is where the MGM experience begins. You find your way to Las Vegas Boulevard South and Tropicana Avenue, roll up the driveway and leave your vehicle in the hands of a valet, your luggage in the hands of an attendant. But because there are only about 1,200 valet parking spaces to serve 5,005 rooms, a casino and eight restaurants, you may instead be redirected to the hotel's self-parking structure, as my wife and I were on a busy Saturday night. The parking is free there, but the spaces are uncomfortably tight, and a 100-yard-long tunnel separates you from the hotel.
On the ground floor, in its casino and public rooms, the hotel is as loud and colorful as any Las Vegas lover could hope. The registration area leads immediately to the din of gaming: a Monte Carlo area, a Hollywood area, a sports area, an Emerald City area. Wolfgang Puck's Cafe stands brightly tiled in the middle of it all, offering a short menu with no entrees over $14.50.
Beyond the Emerald City casino, near the lion's head entrance, a 75-foot-high crystalline Emerald City rises in a broad atrium. A cast of three-dimensional figures from ``The Wizard of Oz'' stand out front inviting gee-whiz snapshots. Around the periphery, the 1,000-seat Oz Buffet attracts long lines; the 750-seat Studio Cafe surrounds casual diners with posters from old MGM movies; a couple of stages offer live entertainment, and a corridor leads to five more restaurants, a fast-food court, a couple of retail shops, an arcade, an Oz Midway, a supervised youth center and, finally, to the theme park.
Upstairs, the guest rooms come in four basic flavors: Oz (complete with prints of scenes from the movie, gold crown moldings and bedspreads with bright-red poppy patterns), ``Hollywood,'' ``The Old South'' and ``Casablanca.'' There are about 750 suites, about 330 of which are really oversized bedrooms with a sofa and two TVs. Some others, however, perch on the 29th floor, fill 3,000 square feet in split-level design and are served by one butler and up to 27 telephones each. Prices for standard rooms usually range from $59 (on the slowest nights) to $129. The priciest suites, often reserved by the casino and offered free to high rollers, fetch up to $2,500.
If the MGM is ready enough to rent out its rooms, a guest should feel free to let loose with his mixed marks.
Good marks: Our Thursday night check-in took all of nine minutes. Our 16th-floor room had a fine view of The Strip and the mountains beyond. We had a terrific Southwestern dinner at Mark Miller's Coyote Cafe (an independently run restaurant in the compound), and two good and timely room-service breakfasts. We enjoyed an expertly assembled Smokey Robinson show in the 630-seat Hollywood Theatre (tickets: $44 each). Wake-up calls came on time. When little things went wrong, service personnel were cheerful and acted quickly to remedy them.
Bad marks: Many little things were amiss. The only phone was in a far corner of our room, about six paces away from the bed. Busy signals blocked all my efforts to directly call any room in the first nine floors. In the shower, the hot and cold water indicators were reversed. Downstairs at Leonardo's restaurant, a waitress accidentally substituted bruschetta (bread) for prosciutto (ham). At breakfast in the Studio Cafe, another waitress substituted blueberries for bananas. At the theme park, a computer crash and communication breakdown left us standing in line for half an hour. Back in our room and unable to reach room service on Saturday night, we found no minibar. (Only the hotel's 423 costliest suites, I learned later, have minibars.)
But checking out proves as painless as checking in. With the Super Bowl preoccupying the masses, we're in our car and on our way within 20 minutes. Soon the world's largest hotel is a distant green speck in the desert, and I'm formulating advice for those who would seek it out.
Expect big things and friendly people, but keep in mind that whether you lay down a penny in the casino or not, you'll be a hostage of odds.
by CNB