Vol. 4, No. 6, June 2008
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LEARNING THE BUSINESS
Las Vegas lodging lessons paying off in Nashville
Arthur Keith continues to weave the magic. The former Station Casinos, Rio and Venetian executive brought storybook growth to a Southeast hotel giant. A hotel stalwart seasoned in gaming by Las Vegas, Keith brought a new era to the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
Every year since he arrived in 2004, it has been named one of the world’s top destinations. Keith, the company’s senior vice president and general manager, was named the American Hotel and Lodging Association’s General Manager of the Year in 2006.
He helps the resort enjoy its current heyday. With more than 600,000 square feet of flexible meeting space, it boasts the largest non-gaming, in-hotel exhibition space in the world.
“Opryland offers everything with the exception of slot machines,” Keith says. “We’re outstanding by the measure of any non-Las Vegas market. In Vegas, the intensity of the entertainment side is better than in most markets, but we’ve got an excellent entertainment setup here, too.”
Keith has an aura in Nashville. Stories circulate about the top leader observing patron-worker interaction from a shoeshine stand. The 4,000 employees are called “stars.” They jam his calendar for monthly “food with the dude” luncheons, long affairs in which team members from any department can meet and strategize with him.
Given a background in athletics and a minister father, Keith is part leader, coach, motivational speaker and mentor to his employees.
They have listened.
Employee turnover rates have dwindled. Occupancy rates have skyrocketed to where they were 25 years ago. Opryland enjoys a renaissance.
Keith is unique in the hotel-gaming dynamic. Many hotel executives leap into the excitement of gaming. Keith, however, used the industry to augment his passion for hotel management.
Las Vegas expanded his credentials. Station Casinos, the Rio and the Venetian gave him the best of both worlds from 1995 to 2004, when the mega-hotel gaming dynamic was booming.
“Vegas shaped me like nothing else you can imagine,” he said. “It was the exposure of doing things on a large scale as well as the level of entertainment and the amenities. Vegas does it like nobody else. The energy can be around the gaming floor, the entertainment, the music, the life, the ambience. It was great to watch how people flow, what they’re doing for the good time, how they are ending up with a great experience.”
It has been an interesting journey for Keith. The Elmira, New York native majored in hotel management with a finance concentration at Cornell University, where he also played football. He fashioned hotel stints in Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Baltimore. In the mid ‘90s, he was recruited by Station to learn the gambling end, and then bring the gaming-hotel package back to Las Vegas.
Keith was part of the team that designed and constructed the $300 million Station Casino complex in Kansas City. He later came here to serve in the Rio All-Suites Hotel and the Venetian, where he was the vice president of hotel operations.
“The Venetian was a once in a millennium hotel project,” Keith says of the world’s largest hotel resort. “It embraced the convention market like nobody else did. The hotel did more money than gaming; it wasn’t even close for awhile. The hotel rooms were like slot machines, you could always count on them.”
Keith long had an affinity for hotel customers. He knew how meeting planners decided where to book conventions. Keith understood the value of picking up people in limos, honoring late checkout requests, expressing gratitude and realizing the impact delivered by conventioneers at all levels.
“One day we were talking about groups of 200 to 500 people, not huge groups, but important nonetheless,” Keith recalls. “Some people were rationalizing the OK to give them less than the usual stellar service. I went into a sermon for the next 20 minutes. I said if these groups were at 98 percent of the cities in this country, they would be the biggest group that city had and the business in that city would have to pay attention to them.
“Why should it be different in Las Vegas just because we are bigger? Do the math. Say you figure this customer is worth x amount of dollars. Then let’s say he whacks you at the tables, but then thinks it’s not worth the effort to come back because he wasn’t treated properly. Now you’ve lost. That meeting was one of the few times I ever got PO’d.”
Keith has always championed the small, yet significant niceties for guests. That includes a disdain for long lines.
“One day in Vegas I was coming in on a Sunday afternoon, 2 p.m., and there was a line all the way around the corner to check in,” Keith says. “I grabbed the assistant manager and told him I wanted something done. He said, ‘This is nothing. This is Vegas, people expect it.’ To me, that made no sense. We worked hard to coach people out of that philosophy and we did.”
Customers gained the same service afforded superstar athletes. Keith also knew how to back up his workers. Basketball bad man Dennis Rodman tested this theory.
“Rodman comes to check into the Rio and was told that he qualified for two rooms,” Keith says. “He starts demanding extra rooms. He badgers the host, says, ‘Give me the floor manager,’ and starts cursing the people at the front desk. He gets told again that what he has is two rooms, so he says, ‘The hell with you guys, I’m going to the Palms.’ He runs out the front door, gets into eight lanes of traffic and now he’s there with all these cars buzzing around him. He jumps a six-foot fence, hops onto Flamingo and runs down to the Palms. I don’t know if he got a room or not, but he’s one of those characters who gives you something to talk about.”
Keith watches the characters all day. He encourages workers to think big, learn quickly and be unafraid to fail. The Vegas veteran has exported his gaming-hotel portfolio to the Southeast.
For Opryland, Keith is the symbol of its rebirth.
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