Behind the Scenes: MGM Resorts and the Precision of F1 Las Vegas

Glenn: Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality. Friend Glenn here in Las Vegas. Guess what? F1 is coming up November 20th, and I’m curious because I wanted to go behind the scenes, how does MGM Resorts International and other people in the city all come together to create an awesome event for you and me? I got our old friend here, John Flynn, SVP of Global Security and Aviation. It is so great to see you, man. Good to see you again in person or in person. And it’s nice to be able to talk to you about something so cool uniting this city behind a world class event.

 

John: Yeah, it really is exciting. And you know, this city, we’re we’re used to being able to do these citywide events and broadcast this and, and work together, you know, in such a seamless way. And so formula one is really no different, right? No different than Superbowl. No different than a New Year’s Eve where we’re closing down the strip. Except it’s three nights, right?

 

Glenn: Right through November 2021 and 22.

 

John: Yeah, three nights. And that’s what. That’s what makes it different. Yeah, but that’s what makes it even funner for us because it’s not just, you know, a single event for four hours. It’s three nights of.

 

Glenn: Right.

 

John: It’s a rolling event.

 

Glenn: It must be nice on your side to be able to experience it over a long period of time, as opposed to planning for a year and a half, like a Super Bowl. And it’s over over.

 

John: An hour or something. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s I mean, we’re going to start or we started building the blog at the Fountain Club going back in September. Right. So you started to see those things come to life early on even the first year that we did this. It’s really important that you have internal stakeholder meetings and external stakeholder meetings. All of our partners in law enforcement. Right. And then even our even our industry partners up and down the strip, we have to be interconnected in terms of how we approach a large citywide event like this.

 

Glenn: So how did the logistics all come together to make sure that everyone has an amazing experience while they’re in town?

 

John: It’s important to have those meetings up front. Yeah, I think so.

 

Glenn: What do they like? Right. Because I’m sure they’re like, hey, what kind of amenities can we do? What kind of new things can we bring? And how can we make it easy for everybody to experience that?

 

John: That’s what you do, especially internal of the company. But but we’re also trying to offer these experiences, you know, from property to property. So making sure each property is aware of where all the activations are at. And making sure that the signage is in the right place. Make sure the guests know that hey, if I got tickets here, I got tickets there. They know exactly how to get there in the fastest way possible.

 

Glenn: It seems like an awful lot of coordination, especially because you guys are frenemies, right? With the other folks in town. Everybody in this town knows each other. But you’re also going head to head, right?

 

John: With. With everything but security.

 

Glenn: Right?

 

John: Security for sure. Yeah.

 

Glenn: But I’m talking about you had mentioned, you know, certain activations here, certain activations over there. So you got to make sure there’s no overlap and that sort of a thing. Right.

 

John: That’s correct. That’s correct. So there are certain things that we talk about publicly and work together on. But there’s certain things that we do want to keep, you know, somewhat somewhat close, totally and appropriate for, you know, all of our guests, our VIPs. So for our VIP customers.

 

Glenn: All right. So you’re also into aviation. That must be a crazy coordination game between you, the city, Harry Reid Airport, the FAA, the FAA, all of that kind of stuff.

 

John: It’s nuts. It’s thousands of flights. And again, it’s over the course of three days now everybody leaves in the same day. Right. But you have limited airspace, limited parking, limited hangar space, and so you have slot times you set up with the FAA and you got to hit those slot times. Right. So the goodness. Yeah. So we got to be there plus or -5 or 10 minutes. If you don’t make it you’re going to the end of the line.

 

Glenn: So part of what you have to do is coordinate to make sure that your guests at great hotels like the Bellagio make it in time, because they’re not waiting on the Uber line is mine. That’s right.

 

John: Yeah. And that’s why the communication upfront is very key. If you set those expectations and and you let them know that. Right. Because they can say like, look, if you’re late, that’s cool to just know it’s going to be six hours delayed before you can before you can leave.

 

Glenn: And some people might be cool with that too. Yeah. Right. Especially if there’s some of your better customers that are out there.

 

John: And they always love the experience with us. Right. So if they get to stay with us an extra six hours, that’s pretty cool.

 

Glenn: So how do you think about creating amazing experiences for MGM resorts that are a little bit different, and keep moving the dialogue with your customers forward?

 

John: That’s always the trick of the matter, right? I think staying up to date on the trends, understanding what the guests are asking for, seeing what else is out there in terms in terms of the marketplace, but also just based upon some of the feedback we get from the guests, like if they want something new or they want something different, they’re going to tell us. So some of the activations that we do are based upon some of that guest feedback that we’ve had over the last couple of years.

 

Glenn: What’s one cool activation that you did that really?

 

John: Shui bah shui? I don’t get to take credit for that. That’s the brand marketing team, right? But that’s basically, you know, a racing shoe that we got that set up about two years ago. You can go buy one out there by the blog. You found the club and the Bellagio portico there. We fill it up with with a beverage of choice type thing. We’re going to pay premium for it because it’s a pretty sweet type of shoe, right?

 

Glenn: Sure.

 

John: But we’ve continued to take that to different levels.

 

Glenn: Totally. Listen, if I’m sipping out of a shoe, I’m going world class. You know, no sandals for me. So one of the other things that it’s so important to give back to the community, and you guys are great with that. And I know that taking care of the military is really important to you since you served as well. Plus, you’re a good, good American. Yeah. You know.

 

John: Yeah. Yeah. Well, November is, you know, we celebrate Veterans Day, and we’re going into our 15th year of hosting a salute to the troops. So it’s a partnership with the USO and American Airlines. We’re going to bring about 80 to 100 wounded service members and their caretakers and families. And we get to celebrate their service for about 4 to 5 days and nights. They just get to let their hair down. But the most I think touching part of it is when they arrive. We have about 1000 1500 of our employees. They set up what’s called the Wall of Gratitude at Mandalay Bay. And so when when the service members show up, we got 1500 of our employees with signs with noisemakers out there, you know, tears in our eyes. And for them, for our service members walking into, we’ve had someone say like, man, this is great. Like, it’s really the first time I’ve felt like I’m back home of being amongst your employees here. Wow. So for our employees, do like for us like to be able to make that type of hospitality and connections with people, to be able to make those connections at such a deeper level. Right. That’s what we do with salute to the troops over Veterans Day.

 

Glenn: That’s awesome. And not only that, but I think you’re taking it to another level by giving them experiences that they may not have been able to have on their own. And I think that is just such a a cool, selfless thing for a corporation to be doing out there.

 

John: Yeah, it’s probably my favorite day of the year. Yeah. Favorite event of the year? Formula one’s pretty cool. Awesome. But being able to see these founding members and the service members having fun and seeing our employees respond to it. It’s truly incredible.

 

Glenn: My favorite day of the year is when fish is in town. But, you know. Oh, yeah. Anything else that you want to talk about today?

 

John: Yeah, I think we were talking about, like, how we take care of our veterans. Right. And yeah, it’s really coming up on businesses like us to really promote those events, let people know how much service is valued because we value service in our company. Right, right. I know you value service too, but also like our sons and daughters are watching, right? That’s the next generation of who we’re trying to recruit in. And so they want to see it’s Instagrammable, right? They want to see the TikTok type performance. They want to see those stories that we can go out there and tell. That’s why those types of events are so important. That’s why we recruit military service members. And their spouses got about 6 to 7000 employees here in Vegas. Or when you count, like the rest of the trip, I’m sure it’s ten, 15, 20,000. And this is a city that was really built on veterans and service at Nellis Air Force Base and a few other bases. So yeah, a pretty, pretty cool place to be.

 

Glenn: That’s a pretty cool place to be. One thing I would have liked to have done is go back to the 50s and been seeing those nuclear tests that they would have. In fact, before we knew that was not a good idea.

 

John: But on the black goggles and check it out.

 

Glenn: So what is your favorite thing about your position now as SVP of Global Security in Aviation?

 

John: I think it’s the people. Yeah, we got about 2000 503,000 or so, you know, security employees and security is really the front line of guest service, right? Right. So a lot of a lot of our guests, when they show up, the first person they see is an MGM security officer. And sometimes the last person they see is MGM security officer, too. So I think being able to kind of bridge the, the, the robust security layers that we have, along with doing that in a genuine hospitality type format, that’s always the trick of being able to do that. And you can’t do that by just having really strong security training, which we have. You can’t do that by by just focusing solely on the guest service. You have to look at it comprehensively. And how do you overlap these two things together. So I think that’s that’s really that’s really tricky to do that. But it really gets you involved in all different parts of the business. And that’s that’s what’s been exciting for me.

 

Glenn: And there’s something different every single day for you I’m sure as well, which is pretty cool.

 

John: It is, it is I mean, company wide. We’ve got new activations and things going on here, new every week. And so I think planning, just like we talked about planning formula one, we do that same sort of planning model for any sort of thing.

 

Glenn: That we have. So now that we’re headed into the third year of F1, is it getting easier to plan it because you’ve already figured stuff out? How does how is the changes since year one?

 

John: I think the anytime you do something the first year, there’s a lot of the unknowns, right? We think it’s going to work. We’re experts.

 

Glenn: And then I say this all the time. Then the customer tells you how it’s going to work. Yeah. No matter how you plan, it.

 

John: Could do this better, could do that better. Our own employees and our senior leadership team. Like we see things that we can do better and even the city at large, like we see things that we can do better to.

 

Glenn: Like moving the race to 8 p.m..

 

John: Yeah, yeah, I think I think that’s that’s that’s a good probably a good move, right? I know for. For folks that want to go to bed a little bit earlier probably helps them out too.

 

Glenn: Yeah, I was confessing I couldn’t make the 10 p.m. start time. Yeah.

 

John: Yeah. I mean, we’re going to be up all night. Totally. Right. Making sure it’s safe, secure experience. But those are the sorts of things that that I think are meaningful. I mean, it’s a it’s going to be a packed weekend as it is. So we’re excited about that. But I think it’s really like trying to figure out how do you continue to elevate that guest experience. And that’s why we love challenging each other. Right. It is good to have that that frenemy relationship that you have. What are they doing? But what are those guys doing? And then we just try to up the ante every year and make that guest experience better year in and year out.

 

Glenn: Right. You got to learn where you got to learn to to to make sure that everything runs smoothly. And then you got to get Intel to be able to beat them and, you know, out there. Yeah. That’s right. Right. I love it. Thank you so much John. This has been awesome. Yeah you got it I appreciate it.

 

John: It’s been fun.

 

Glenn: I appreciate you guys out there for watching. Of course, that’s John Flynn. I’m Glenn Hausman. Please like share subscribe this video. We’re here at Park MGM. Come and have an amazing smoke free experience over here, and we’ll see you next time.