I’ve checked into hotels with great big boxes of trade show materials. I lugged around a huge injection-molded plastic case that had the booth sign structure thingy in it. That case would have held ten automatic rifles, easy. Perhaps more. Plus ammo.
I don’t know why anyone thinks this would be difficult to pull off. It would be very easy. Hotels don’t have any significant amount of security.
Steve Wynn says his hotels would have caught on. Story here.
I call complete BS on Steve Wynn. He is just trying to turn a tragedy into a marketing angle for his hotels.
If they really started banging on the door of everyone who had a DND sign on their door after 12 hours, there would be a lot of pissed off guests who would never stay at his hotels again. And while this guy may be a ‘modest’ gambler compared to some of the whales the hotel hosts, he would definitely be known as a regular on the gambling circuit in terms of a guy you would want to comp. And a regular would be afforded certain rules being bent that normal people might have to abide by. That is to say, even IF there was a DND sign 12-hour harassment policy, I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t apply to him.
And this business of being ejected from the hotel for having a gun? In Vegas? Yeah, right. Aside from the obvious problems with people who are legally carrying the guns and those attending gun shows (which I have been to myself in Vegas), I think if gun owners were regularly being confronted and tossed from his hotels, you would be reading about it all over the Internet. Every time someone complains on an airline, you hear about them getting thrown off and it turns into a media circus. According to Steve Wynn, he is tossing people at every socioeconomic/gambling class level all the time from his hotels, and yet I have never read a single story about a pissed off customer. Imagine a time when all the rooms in Vegas are booked solid (e.g. CES or other huge media event), and people are getting tossed for legal gun ownership without another hotel to stay at within 50 miles on short notice. Now ask yourself how you ARE NOT hearing that story broadcast everywhere on the Internet and especially by right wing news sources that see any violation of the 2nd amendment as an affront to God and humanity.
I can’t find a link to it, but I recently read an article that said that’s true. Basically the article said that high rollers can be eccentric and they want privacy so they get left alone in a way than the average guest might not. I got the subtle impression from the article that the “eccentricities” more typically involve sex and drugs.
I don’t understand why people think the hotel should’ve noticed the bags. These places are huge and it’s not like you even walk directly past the check-in desk on the way in, it’s usually tucked away. And busy. The clerks aren’t sitting around waiting for guests like they do at your neighborhood Days Inn. There’s pretty much always a line. And the places have multiple entrances and exits.
Is it possible this guy had extreme OCD that escalated to psychosis? His (reportedly) empty houses, (possible) sexual complusions, gun collecting and compulsive gambling could be signs? Could he have been so compulsive\ritualistic that once he had the thoughts of killing folks he couldn’t get off that path?
I think it’s weird that he (reportedly) zonked out on Valium all day before the evening massacre. Is this a “drug of choice” for psychosis? I guess of he were a night gambler he could have been using it regularly to sleep. Still weird.
The times we stayed in Vegas, in Treasure Island, the only obvious security for the hotel was flashing a room key to security before getting on an elevator. They never seemed to care what or how much we had with us. And neither did anyone else anywhere we went. And we often had lots of stuff from shopping (some of the stores there are pretty neat).
I doubt Vegas security is going to change too much after this, it won’t be like the airlines after 9/11. If they did then Vegas would stop being Vegas.
This. Hotels don’t give a crap what you bring in (except maybe a pack of ardvaarks or something), especially about highrollers who regularly drop gazillions at the table. I’m wondering if folks wondering about his packing in numerous bags have ever been to Vegas? It’s usually a madhouse at hotels.
If that’s actually an accurate statement of his hotels’ policies, that’s pretty shitty for the guests.
“Investigated” might mean the front desk places a call to the room to make sure everything is OK and if they don’t get an answer make a note to try again in another 12 hours. I don’t think they have a security team break down the door after 12 hours but I’m sure they prefer to have some idea the room isn’t being damaged or a guest isn’t sick or dead in there after enough time, and have other ways to investigate.
Housekeeping staff at Mandalay Bay said they have a policy to enter a room with a security staff member after “several days” of having a DND sign out. As far as I can tell we don’t actually know Paddock had the sign out for days. He might have been allowing housekeeping in from time to time up until the last day.
Wynn isn’t completely full of shit. A year before this shooting he warned that Las Vegas was a ‘target city’ and implemented a bunch of security measures including hidden metal detectors and specially trained security. Since the shooting it was announced they have installed metal detectors at all entrances.
When I have gone to a hotel with my dogs, I have had the DnD sign up a lot because it’s up whenever the dogs are there, and sometimes they are there alone. I remember one time, I had the sign up for pretty much three days solid, and I got a call from housekeeping asking me if I was aware that the room wasn’t getting cleaned because of the sign. I said yes, then added that I would be tipping because I was aware that this made their job harder on the day I left, with dog hair accumulation, etc. That was the end of it.
I always tip housekeeping anyway, but I did leave a pretty generous tip that time.
FTR: I’ve never had a dog that was vicious, but my dogs have always been big, and I don’t think housekeeping wants to deal with them. They probably would not go into protective mode in an hotel room, but I don’t know that they wouldn’t bark at people who entered the room when I was not there. Besides, I had one once who tried to bite vacuum cleaners. Hated them.
IIRC in Hunter Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” (true, 50-plus years old but probably relevant) the hotel staff never saw the inside of his room until after the whole room was ankle-deep in garbage, broken glass, rotten food, and assorted other debris.
Of course, that was only after a few days…
That’s got to be bullshit. Really. If you get back to your room at 10PM and put out the DND sign, they’re going to “investigate” if you don’t leave the room by 10AM? Bullshit. They’d be investigating almost every guest every night. And if it’s true, remind me never to go to a Wynn hotel.
As with an earlier poster, I generally don’t bother with having my room cleaned if I’m there for a week or less. Various hotels react to it in different ways, but only once have I ever had hotel security knock on my door to check on me when I did that. I can’t recall which hotel, but it was in Las Vegas (it may have been the Gold Coast), and it was after three straight days with the DND sign up. In hotels I’m not familiar with, I will usually call housekeeping for the first day or two to let them know that I’m not interested in having my room cleaned.
At a very high-end hotel in San Francisco I had multiple extended stays with this year, they have a fairly clever way of dealing with it. They always leave a pre-printed note (mostly) tucked under my door acknowledging that I’d left the DND sign up and that my room would not be cleaned. My assumption is that they can tell I’ve been in and out of the room by the fact that the note was being picked up every day, and I further assume that if those notes started accumulated without moving, they’d have security investigate. But since I always collected them, I was never disturbed.
I’ll also join the chorus calling BS on Steve Wynn. I can’t imagine that anyone was ever paying attention to the amount of luggage anyone was bringing to their room. I was in Vegas (staying at the Rio) when the shooting happened. There was a noticeable increase in security afterward, but by “increase,” I mean there were a couple of guys in bright yellow shirts who had not been around before. Hard to say if they were looking for anything specific, or if they were just there to give people the reassurance of increased security. But other than that, you would have been hard pressed to notice any change at all. Had I not already been aware of the news before leaving my room the morning after the shooting, there wouldn’t have been a clue that anything had happened.
I saw a report that said that, as a high roller, the shooter was able to use a private elevator to bring up his luggage.
Mandalay Bay and Rio aren’t Wynn hotels. As I said, more than a year before this shooting Wynn installed hidden metal detectors and specially trained security in his hotels because he worried that LV was a ‘target city’ for terrorism.
They may or may not pay attention to how many bags someone has (that is essentially impossible since people can come and go during their stay) but if someone set off a silent metal detector walking through the hotel at least security could watch them from a distance. The balance of keeping guests happy and comfortable while trying to ensure their safety isn’t easy but he is right that at least he recognized the potential and took some steps to adapt to the new threats that Vegas was facing.
Of course he isn’t above saying “I told you so” and marketing the safety of his hotels now that a tragedy has happened at someone else’s, but he wasn’t full of shit about the general threat or the measures he took long ago to try to prevent it.
When I’m traveling with work I book directly with my hotel and their member rewards program. I actually have the front desk instruct housekeeping to only do a weekly cleaning because it gets me bonus points on their program. No need for even the DND card.
I think CNN said he used the “Service Elevator” - i.e. he got to go with the Bell Boy and his luggage in the freight elevator. This means (unlike some smaller hotels) they had a dedicated elevator for staff and equipment so you don’t share an elevator with the laundry cart. The slightly odd behaviour would be the suggestion he stayed with his luggage rather than waiting for it to be brought up - but not terribly unusual. I suppose they get people from time to time who want to keep an eye on their luggage.
I don’t get how the metal detectors would be useful here - they’d catch a person coming into a casino with a gun on their person, but I’d expect them to be going off all the time at luggage, since things like laptops, vibrators, other sex toys, medical braces, jewelry, and a bunch of other items are going to have enough metal to set off a detector but be absolutely routine in luggage. To say nothing of metal in the actual luggage’s construction! Are they really going to stop and inspect every bag of luggage that comes into the hotel?
I was thinking the same thing; you have to make a special effort NOT to set off the metal detector at the airport by taking keys out of your pocket, watches, phones, belt buckles, etc. Whether the detector would be hidden or not, I can only see it going off on 99% of the people walking through. So you have your secret security team watching 99% of the guests walk through the lobby to the elevator for their 8 hour shift… what does that accomplish? I think after about an hour of secretly looking at every guest walking past I’d be bored stiff and just mentally check out.
Vegas is a mecca for conventions and trade shows. People traveling with displays, promotion materials, samples, products, etc. often have nowhere to keep all the stuff they haul with them from out of state that the only place to keep it is their hotel room. It’s not uncommon for large containers to be moved in and out of hotels at all hours of the day 365 days a year.