By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
Just 24 hours after Allegiant Stadium hosted the first Las Vegas Raiders game with fans, the sleek, domed stadium west of the Strip was the star of show again Sunday.
This time, the 65,000-seat venue was a living classroom for 1,400 attendees of the Association of Luxury Suite Directors (ALSD) conference, where everyone from ticket brokers to premium seating directors to venue operators got a firsthand look at the various clubs and suites at Allegiant Stadium tonight. The trade show visitors checked out the Wynn Field Club behind the north end zone, the Shift 4 Club on the suite level and the Modelo Cantina Club for networking amid stadium food dishes and an open bar.
Bill Dorsey, Cincinnati-based ALSD founder and chairman who was editor and publisher of Skybox magazine, said it was the first time in the 31-year history of the luxury seating trade show that Las Vegas was the host.
And the reason? The Raiders’ sparkling and palatial new home, a $2 billion project built in only 31 months and constructed with $750 million in public dollars from Southern Nevada.
Before the trade show participants were bussed over to the stadium from the Aria on the Strip. they heard from Mark Shearer, Raiders chief revenue officer; Charlie Thornton, co-chief executive officer of CAA ICON; and Keith Robinson, director and design architect of MANICA Architecture, the stadium’s architect. The session, “Creating Allegiant Stadium: Raider Nation’s New Home,” was the main topic for the conference at the Aria Sunday.
The trio agreed it was amazing to see the building come alive with fans at a Raiders game Saturday when fans were allowed to attend a Raiders game for the first time in Las Vegas when they were not allowed to attend any of the eight home games in the inaugural 2020 season in Las Vegas because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thornton, Shearer, and Robinson also said pace of the 31-month construction timeline was astounding, and remarkable when you consider construction of the venue on the west side of Interstate 15 across from Mandalay Bay moved forward during the pandemic in 2020 when even the Strip was shuttered for two months.
Here’s the stadium construction site before it opened on time and on budget in late July 2020.
The design-build approach involved physically designing aspects of the stadium while work was moving forward in other parts of the stadium.
The panel, moderated by Melissa Heiter of CAA ICON, showed “concept” and “reality” renderings and photos of Allegiant Stadium and it was remarkable how close the reality pictures looked to the concept pics.
LVSportsBiz.com attended Saturday’s game. The stadium might want to work on adjusting concession stand lines because there were chokepoints on the main concourse when pedestrian traffic was running into some long lines from the points of sale. Perhaps more points of sale and more workers to adjust the concessions activity on the main concourse?
Before the Allegiant Stadium chat, Professional Bull Riders Chief Marketing Officer Kosha Irby gave the keynote address, explaining that it was PBR that held the very first live sporting event in the country in spring 2020 after the sports industry shut down in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
While UFC President Dana White and UFC drew a lot of attention for putting on a UFC fight show in Jacksonville in May 2020, it was actually the Professional Bull Riders that staged the first live sports event during the pandemic in Oklahoma in April 2020. Interestingly enough, both UFC and PBR are owned by entertainment company Endeavor.
Another interesting connection between PBR and Las Vegas during the pandemic is that Professional Bull Riders had four weeks of team competition at the South Point Arena every weekend in June before holding the first indoor sports event with fans during COVID-19 in South Dakota in July 2020. The UFC event in Jacksonville in May 2020 did not have fans.
The ALSD conference continues Monday and it features a visit to another prominent Las Vegas sports venue — T-Mobile Arena, home of the Vegas Golden Knights and UFC and not too far from the Aria.