Meeting News - March 24, 2008 - (Page 48)

Destination Insider: Las Vegas Presto Change-O: Las Vegas Acts, Clubs Still Mixing It Up Cher joins Bette Midler at Caesars Palace; more nightlife venues are on line A number of new restaurants, shows, and nightclubs have recently opened along the Strip or will open in the coming months. Cher has just signed a three-year deal to headline at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace beginning May 6, with 200 shows that will alternate with Bette Midler’s new show, The Showgirl Must Go On, which debuted at the Colosseum last month. The Cirque du Soleil show built around illusionist Criss Angel is still on target to open this summer at Luxor. Last fall, Eyecandy sound lounge and bar opened at Mandalay Bay with a high-tech interactive dance ﬂoor that changes its look with guests’ movements. Both Starlight Tattoo at House of Blues and McFadden’s Restaurant and Saloon at the Rio AllSuite Hotel and Casino have opened this year. The 7,000-sf McFadden’s includes a private party room and island bar that accommodates 150 guests. Next up for the proliﬁc Light Group are Brand, a fine-dining steak house at Monte Carlo, and an ultra-contemporary Japanese restaurant at the Bellagio, both of which are scheduled to open by the end of the year. —HWB All-Access Tours Can Reward Adventurous Incentive Winners Many shows and attractions in Las Vegas now allow groups to get a look at their inner workings, such as the backstage tour of the Jubilee! spectacular at Bally’s. The behind-the-scenes tours delve into many fascinating aspects of what keeps the attractions going and entertaining guests. Designed especially for spouses of meeting attendees, the afternoon backstage program at Jubilee! begins when a showgirl in street clothes walks in and sits in front of the participants. She then does her elaborate makeup routine and leads guests to a backstage tour that winds through the prop room, the dressing room housing the show’s elaborate costumes, and the feather room housing the giant ornaments worn by the showgirls. The tour can be combined with a lunch served on the show’s stage. Planners for high-end (read: small-group) incentives don’t have to rely on echolocation to seek out entertaining programs with the pair of groupcentric attractions at Siegfried & Roy’s Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat at the Mirage resort. Limited to groups of ﬁve, a VIP guided tour shows guests the training and care that go into the bottlenose dolphins, white lions, and white tigers living at the animal oasis. Participants get to commemorate their experience with 8-by-10 copies of a group photo taken with one of the habitat’s dolphins. If attendees want to get hands-on, the habitat allows them to become dolphin trainers for a day, working side by side with a professional trainer. Incentive winners get to train, feed, and play with the dolphins for six hours, preceded by a breakfast and private tour and intermitted by a three-course lunch on a private patio overlooking the venue. At the ﬁnish, participants get a personalized photo CD of the day, among other gifts. Then, there’s a tour at the Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit. The 30-minute excursion at the 1.6million-gallon attraction takes participants through an educational program involving the nuts and bolts of water filtration, saltwater making, food preparation for the 2,000 marine inhabitants, and animal care. Groups go face to face with sawﬁsh, giant rays, endangered green sea turtles, piranha, and rare golden crocodiles—aside from the sharks for which the attraction is named. Some backstage tours aren’t advertised, but planners should ask if their groups are interested in a particular show or attraction, because a private excursion can be possibly arranged for the right group. r —WN www.meetingnews.com Three years of Cher at Caesars Colosseum Catapult Into Greatness Among Your Attendees Ready to give up on teambuilding events? Ritz-Carlton, Lake Las Vegas thinks you should try a wacky creation by its Creative Event Services team ll right. Build a catapult. Now, make me want to buy it. If that sounds ridiculous, it’s all part of the fun for a new teambuilding offering at Ritz-Carlton, Lake Las Vegas. The Creative Event Services squad has made it their business to keep groups entertained and energized, as attendees work together to bond over some seriously perplexing problems. Geoff Rhodes, director of these events, hands them all the pieces to get things off the ground—in this case, very literally. Bungee cord, PVC pipe, cardboard, and duct tape: That’s all a group needs to build a catapult. But according to Rhodes, that little physics problem is just the beginning. “The best part is actually launching it,” he said, noting the amount of energy he sees rise up among a group as it prepares for the ﬁnal element of the competition. “We give each team an orange, and they have to use their contraptions to launch the orange as far as possible onto the lake, targeting A one of our staff members sitting in a boat wearing a T-shirt with a bulls-eye on it.” The teams must impress a panel of judges during a one-minute sales pitch about why the public would want to buy their contraptions. They are judged on their attention to detail, creativity, and teamwork, and they earn points based on launch distance and hitting targets. The two- to three-hour event can be staged for up to 500 meeting-goers. —HWB 48 MeetingNews March 24, 2008 http://www.meetingnews.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Meeting News - March 24, 2008

Meeting News - March 24, 2008 Contents What’s Up @ MeetingNews.com Chef Talk: Rosen Shingle Creek’s David Ramirez Convention Centers MN Webcast Report Successful Meetings University Advertisers Index Live from the Forum

Meeting News - March 24, 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.