Mandalay Bay Struggles To Find Footing After Las Vegas Shooting
Credit: MGM Resorts
Original Article | Authors: Todd Prince and Nicole Raz
Around dusk on a late November weekday, hundreds of people walked through Mandalay Bay, past empty restaurants just off the casino floor and toward the huge convention center.
Employees of CarMax, the nation’s largest used-car dealer, had gathered here from around the U.S. to attend the company’s annual President’s Club gala, an award ceremony to recognize top talent.
Roughly 4,500 people filled the convention center to eat, dance and hobnob with CarMax senior management. Many employees stayed at the hotel.
"It’s a business trip. We didn’t choose the Mandalay Bay. It was already chosen for us since last year," said CarMax employee Felicia Green.
Visiting from Fayetteville, North Carolina, Green said she wouldn’t have stayed at the Mandalay Bay if she’d had a choice. The Oct. 1 mass shooting that occurred at the hotel was still too fresh in her mind. On that late October Sunday night, a VIP guest staying on the 32nd floor blackened the image of Mandalay Bay when he smashed his room windows to spray gunfire on thousands of concertgoers across Las Vegas Boulevard, killing 58 people.
The shooting raised questions about how the 3,211-room hotel would weather the stigma of the mass shooting. Would people want to gamble, party and sleep where one of the worst mass murderers in American history carried out his crimes?
For Jayson Baboolal, a leisure tourist, the answer is not now.
Visiting Las Vegas from Miami, Baboolal said he would “probably” stay at the Mandalay Bay at some point in the future, but for this trip he chose to stay at New York-New York.
"So many people died there (at the Las Vegas Village festival grounds, across from Mandalay Bay)," he said. "You just get the chills going in there."
