Another anecdote: at a stay at the Waldorf Astoria (NYC) staff knocked and I was asked “there is a woman downstairs who says she is your wife; should we alert her you are our guest?” (It was my wife, FWIW.)
Exactly. Especially in a large Las Vegas casino hotel. There are multiple entrance doors, and these hotels are the largest in the world, with thousands of people coming and going daily in each one. It’s BS, both logistically and logically.
Did you let her in?
Ah, checking up on you, was she?
I sure wouldn’t want to be the manager of the Mandalay Bay Hotel right now. Absolute no-win situation. Either do nothing and be accused of doing nothing, or put up the necessary X-ray, metal detectors, airport-security and see thousands of disgruntled guests, huge drop in business.
Actually, especially for them , it’s a win. They can ask questions and inspect interesting luggage and have a prominent excuse for doing so. To some extent, any hotel in Vegas has the excuse now…
Which is theatre, because the odds of a repeat are pretty low - and if they are too nosy, you are right, some guests may get upset. I bet they use the excuse “the police told us to do this” just like United beat their passenger unconscious with the excuse “FAA rules require us to do this…”
You know, now that I mentioned the Waldorf, it’s apropos to thread and hotel security decisions that since whenever the Waldorf was (pre-Trump, of course) the hotel-where-the-President-stays when he’s in town. Ever since the days of the secret FDR subway and the current warren of entrances and exits, the security procedures of that hotel, at least, must be pretty well thought out.
Metal detectors have to be calibrated. Airport metal detectors seem particularly sensitive in my experience to complete the illusion that TSA is thoroughly screening for dangers. I would imagine a hotel metal detector would be much less sensitive.
There is also no particular reason that a metal detector has to be programmed to be a binary device that just goes off or doesn’t. They can be designed to indicate the strength of the metal’s magnetic field, giving some indication of how much metal the subject is carrying. I could imagine a metal detector that is programmed to record the approximate amount of metal every person comes in with and take photo or video of them for later identification. Tie it in with facial recognition software, the system could keep a decent record of who is bringing heavy metal into the hotel and theoretically flag them for closer observation by security.
Would knowing the amount of metal a person carries be useful for screening guests in a hotel? I doubt it. The metal level for a person with keys, a laptop, and shaving cream container likely exceeds the the metal level for a person with a small handgun. Cameras and tripods would mimic a rifle. A laborer’s tools could exceed the footprint of a small firearms arsenal.
Still, this could be the first flag of suspicious behavior by some patrons that, if coupled with other indicators like insisting on using the freight elevator and hanging a “do not disturb” sign out for several days, might indicate that security should follow up with a person.
I don’t claim to know how or even if the metal detectors are employed, just that the hotels installed them in part of an anti-terrorism plan that also included specially trained security officers whose sole purpose in life was counter-terrorism operations in the hotels.
Some guesses that might answer these doubts: As mentioned by Tired and Cranky, airport metal detectors, which everyone seems to be using as a point of reference, are calibrated to detect minute amounts of metal. A small pocket knife will trigger one, but the casino probably isn’t interested in finding anything that small. They could calibrate them only to trigger on a larger amount of metal than could reasonably be expected to be in a guest’s belongings.
I have read that airport metal detectors are also programmed to randomly generate false positive results to force security to manually screen a passenger. Those times you get a beep, and they ask you to empty your pockets, and you get a beep again, and they manually check you with a wand then let you go on your way, are often a randomly selected false positive that allows security to check your pockets and check you with a wand. The detector never thought you had any metal on you when it insisted on beeping every time you passed through.
In a hotel/casino I would imagine they only detected a fairly large metal object and don’t purposely trigger false positives.
It defies reason to think this is all “BS” and some publicity scam on the hotel’s part, whether or not it is actually effective in detecting armed assassins.
ETA: as to the investigating rooms with a DND sign out for more than 12 hours, Wynn has clarified that policy is new and began only after the mass murder at Mandalay Bay.
How would the detector know that the same person was passing through each time?
But I assume some level of firepower is legal in Vegas? Plus no hotel wants to become known for snitching to police if their out-of-state guests are packing and don’t have the appropriate Nevada licenses?
It looks like I am not going to be staying at the Wynn then and I am sure plenty of other people feel the same way. Let’s say you have two people in a room. One goes to bed at 10 pm while the other goes down to the casino floor to gamble until 4 am (hardly uncommon in Vegas; that is what they want you to do).
Are they really claiming they are going to send security to wake me up and investigate 6 hours after I go to sleep? Screw that, Las Vegas is exhausting and I don’t fall back to sleep easily. Why 12 hours anyway? I can understand multiple days but it is ridiculous to have to give hotel security free access to your room at least twice a day. The whole idea of Las Vegas is built around the idea that there aren’t many rules (there really are some but it is simple to follow them). If they want to be hardasses from now on, screw it, I will just go somewhere much closer to home.
Pure speculation here, but it probably gets into ‘random check’ mode and doesn’t leave it until security clears the subject manually. But I don’t know. I don’t think they publish any such details, nor the casinos, about how exactly the systems work in an effort to avoid teaching people how they can be bypassed.
They don’t stipulate how they “investigate.” Like I posted earlier, that might mean making a friendly call to the room after 12 hours and making a note to try again in 12 more hours if they don’t get an answer.
As far as I know pretty much all of them have a posted ‘no weapons’ policy. So anyone carrying, even with a CC license is trespassing despite not breaking any Nevada laws by ignoring the signs.
I couldn’t find verification of this, but I would be surprised. There are numerous gun shows in Vegas every year, and I would assume that lots of vendors and attendees have firearms. And they’re not going to leave them in their cars.
On the gun boards I frequent, lots of people write about traveling with firearms (for protection, hunting, sport shooting, gun shows, etc), and nearly all stay in hotels all around the country.
Here is a piece from before the shooting (looking for unrelated articles post-shooting is like finding a needle in a haystack) that explains how easy it was to carry at most casinos despite it being prohibited at most of them. It’s from June 2016 and it says only a few hotels, including the Bellagio - a Wynn property, actually used metal detectors and actively attempted to identify people violating the rule.
I would assume these rules apply to carrying in public areas of the hotel and casino and not to storing trade show stock in crates if gun show stock has in fact been allowed in the past.
[QUOTE]
I would assume these rules apply to carrying in public areas of the hotel and casino and not to storing trade show stock in crates if gun show stock has in fact been allowed in the past.
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This brings up another tricky part of this. A person’s hotel room represents his residence during his stay. It might not be so simple to deny people their privacy and Constitutional rights in their hotel room. I agree that the lobby and casino is a different matter.
This would piss people off as well. You put up a Do Not Disturb sign because you don’t want to be disturbed. Being woken up by a phone call is not any better than being woken up by someone knocking at your door.
The 12 hours is also clearly hyperbola. It is not like Steve Wynn is paying people to monitor when the sign went up and then checking every so often until 12 hours are up. If they really do anything it would be to note that the maid service could not get in the room to clean and subsequent later tries still had the sign out.
It may or may not piss off customers but they would call if you had a message and hadn’t stipulated no calls, or if you won a keno game, or wanted to know if you’d like to attend a free show, or whatever. It isn’t unheard of that you might get a call during normal daytime hours for any number of reasons even with a DND sign out.
But it could be that “investigate” means to slip a note part way under the door as mentioned in an earlier post and check to see the notes are being received. Or it might be that “investigate” means to take a look at the guest’s reservation, if they have stayed before, how many days, etc. and then decide whether or not to give it another thought. It could mean pretty much anything, but all it really means is the days of hanging a DND sign out at the beginning of your week long stay and never being given a second thought by security are probably over.