Yo-11 Minutes: Episode 1 "Welcome to the Show"

Yo-Eleven Minutes
Mostly Vegas. No BS. Casino Experience +more
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Yo-11 Minutes: Episode 1 "Welcome to the Show"
The inaugural episode of Yo-11 Minutes, powered by TravelZork.
-Does MGM Deserve Forgiveness?
-Why NOT to panic about the Culinary and Bartenders Union voting to strike.
-New Loyalty Programs Coming to Vegas.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Yo 11 minutes. Yo 11 minutes mostly Vegas, no BS, casino experience and more. Michael Trager is casino travel loyalty expert who also helps people turn their travel dreams into reality. In addition to travel Zork travel, you can visit us at the travel Zork website, which focuses on casino travel and casino experiences. We also have an engaging Facebook group where we talk travel and casino loyalty as well as share experiences. Luxury travel booking travel Zork travel. Visit us at travel Zork travelcom to plan your next amazing vacation and please join the conversation on social media. You can find us easily. All social platforms are at travel Zork and now Michael Trager.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Hi. Well, this is our first day trying to do the Yo 11 minutes thing, which is basically a really simple concept of getting a bunch of news and also casino and travel loyalty ideas, as well as sharing some of our favorite casino experience ideas in a very short, straight to business, no BS format. So what do you think about that, movestro?

Speaker 1: 1:10

I think it is much needed in the community. I think it's really good to get some content that's going to be packed full of stuff digestible. You can watch it anytime, just with your phone, if you're on the lunch break. It's going to be nice and short and to the point. No BS, just the facts, as they like to say.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Exactly, and we're going to try to do this a couple of times a week, keep it very, very timely and it's more about the facts, the news, what we see out there and a couple of our opinions, but probably not that many of our opinions. We're just trying to keep that to a little bit of a minimum and not really too many rumors, more about what we see is going on, because Vegas always has a lot going on.

Speaker 1: 1:53

Yeah, there's a lot of rumors that tend to happen in the Vegas X formerly Twitter and various other places, and basically what we want to do is just give you the facts, stuff you can rely on. We don't follow the headlines that have question marks in them Anytime there's a headline with a question mark in it, it's not really factual. So basically, we just want to give you the facts and get you on your way and on your day with some good Vegas travel, loyalty content points, everything. So a little bit of a background. I'm Michael Movestro. You might know me from Vegas Brightcom or from my YouTube channel, movestro Vegas. I've been reporting on Vegas for since 2015, on and off, been visiting Vegas multiple times a year since 2009. I've recently called Las Vegas home, so I'm going to, I'm living out here now. I'm boots on the ground out here in Las Vegas and I'm happy to come aboard with Michael and the team at Travelzorg.

Speaker 2: 3:00

Yeah, and and we literally came up with this idea a few days ago and your boots on the ground in Vegas part of it just sort of clicked for me, and I've always been impressed at the work you've done at Vegas Bright, as well as your incredible skills at video and DJing skills, which was at Zorkfest in 2018. So I thought, you know what? Let's just, let's just give it a try because it's just. It's just something that you know, something that I would enjoy and I love. I love pontificating and talking about Vegas, but I also like keeping it relatively brief, and I've done that before. I used to do that a lot on our podcast, zorkast, which will be restarting soon, but I think the YouTube format just works a lot better for this kind of thing, don't you think so?

Speaker 1: 3:46

Totally agree. You know video is kind of where it's at right now. You know we were just talking earlier. It's it's, you know, not a lot of blogs anymore. You know everything has, has has gone more into digestible content, whether that be audio or whether that be video. I think what's cool about video is that you know you see the people who are talking, you know you can put a face at the voice, you know you get to see some of those stories, visual elements and stuff like that, and I think it just it just packs more of a punch than you would get from standard audio.

Speaker 2: 4:19

Yes, and people just don't love the blogs as much as they used to, even though I still love them, but it's just a different world. So get us started here. What's going on? How are we going to do this?

Speaker 1: 4:31

All right. Well, I guess the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get on with the news and views of Vegas. Casino Worker Unions authorized a strike threatening first major walkout in 39 years. Members of the Culinary and bartenders unions overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to authorize their negotiating committees to call for a strike by some 53,000 non-gaming strip and downtown casino employees With a chance of one job should be enough. Some 20,000 workers voting in two separate sessions at UNLV's Thomas and Max Center were nearly unanimous in authorizing the first citywide strike against the resort industry in 39 years. So this is pretty huge.

Speaker 1: 5:08

According to a post on the Culinary to Count on, ex-formally known as Twitter, 95% of the members who participated in the vote approved the strike authorization. Representatives of the Culinary Workers 226 and bartenders local 165 said the results of the vote would authorize the strike is largely symbolic but gives the labor leadership, who said they are negotiating with management in good faith, the ability to call for a walkout. So that's going to affect a lot of things out here in Vegas if that goes through. Most of the union members participating in the morning session and those who spoke with the Nevada independent express support for the strike. So that's it for the news. Let's talk about the views. Today's topic does MGM deserve our forgiveness regarding the recent cyber attack that caused personal and financial information of their customers to be exposed to the dark web Trigger? What do you think?

Speaker 2: 6:01

I think that rather amazed at how much grace people have given MGM over this whole thing. And that's not the grace that people have given employees, because the employees have had to. The frontline employees have had to deal with one of the most difficult situations in a casino and hospitality environment. But I think people have been rather forgiving, I mean and I'm using that in a very broad sense of MGM because of this hack. And I'm not really so sure about that because when we look at the casino world of high profits, highest hotel rates in Las Vegas historically ever, lots of additional fees, lots of things which are not consumer friendly, I sort of wonder why people are so understanding, because really this was on MGM's plate and it was MGM's job, mgm Resorts job, to protect their systems and they failed.

Speaker 2: 7:03

And I think, as we were talking about a little bit before, on top of it, it didn't seem they had like a really good disaster recovery plan for what was going on. So it's sort of questionable and, like I said, I want to reiterate the employees are the ones you've got stuck here and what's sort of interesting is a lot of these employees are without a union contract. So it does. You would think about it a little bit because, when you look at, since April the unions have been in talks with MGM Resorts, caesars Entertainment when three of the strips biggest employers, so that those three cover 38,000 employees. So I think what's so interesting is, obviously, this potential strike is historic, and the other thing that's interesting about it is that you've got these MGM employees who you know could be going out on strike, and we all know that MGM was recently saying how thankful they are for their frontline employees and how they couldn't have done it without the incredible work and attitude of those employees. So this is going to be pretty interesting.

Speaker 1: 8:15

I hope MGM remembers those employees during the holiday bonus time.

Speaker 2: 8:19

I want to say that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions about the strike, about whether you should visit Vegas or shouldn't visit Vegas. When this is going to happen, when this is not going to happen and right now I think we should just be calm about it I don't think anyone should be canceling trips. I think you should be. You should see, waiting and seeing, because of course, the media is going to emphasize, you know, the worst things that could happen, or that the strike is definitely going to happen, and I just feel we don't know yet. I think the important thing is is not to get excited about it yet. Right, it's, you know, it's to look at it. It's something out there, it's something happening, it is a big deal, but is it a big deal that's going to impact Vegas, vegas tourism? We don't know the answer to that yet, so we just sort of have to take it one day at a time, and I think that is truly the honest answer to people.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Yeah, yeah, so you, I understand you have a couple of uh uh insulating items that you would like to share.

Speaker 2: 9:26

Well, I was. You know. One of the things that people are always talking about with casino loyalty is how can I do better? And one of the biggest concepts with regard to casino loyalty, which actually hurts players, is that there's been a lack of competition, especially on the strip, because most of the strip is controlled by two programs MGM Rewards and Caesar's Rewards. So what's really exciting is Mirage now has their own program, or Mirage Rock as we like to call it, because it will become hard rock, and I've been hearing a lot of people saying that they're really happy with the comps they are getting at Mirage for their play in comparison to other strip resorts.

Speaker 2: 10:15

That's a very broad stroke. But the other really interesting one is that Rio changes ownership very, very soon, at the beginning of October and they're going to be introducing a new players club. So this is pretty cool that you have new players clubs that are interested in your business, that are interested in getting you to play there, and as part of that equation, they're going to be more competitive. So I think that's really good news on the consumer side and also on the player side. More loyalty programs is always a good thing.

Speaker 1: 10:50

All right. Now. This is a segment that we like to call Travel Tips. Trigger, take it away.

Speaker 2: 10:57

Yeah, I mean. The only travel tip today which I thought was interesting had to do with looking at airfares, and airline flyer on Twitter, or X as they call it, now brought up the concept that some airlines now are bringing back round trip pricing for domestic flights. What that means is, in the current state over the last couple of years, you could buy two one way segments from an airline and if you combine those two one way segments it would cost the same as a round trip for the flights, whereas now, the way it used to be, airlines used to have a different price for one way and then they would have based on a round trip purchase which years ago meant you had to have like a Saturday night stay or something. So this is not the greatest development, because the beautiful thing about everything being priced one way is that you can buy a flight one way on an airline on one airline maybe use an award ticket another way. So this is going to be like sort of a continuing in development if airlines are going to be doing it that way.

Speaker 2: 12:05

But basically, in this example, which was a JFK Pittsburgh flight, the itinerary prices round trip from JFK to Pittsburgh to JFK for $262. But if you booked it separately, it would be 233 one way and 168 one way. So basically it's 53% more to book it as separate segments. So this will be interesting if airlines are starting to do that and obviously the airlines are doing well. Planes are full. They're looking for more, different ways to maximize their revenue and this might be one way for them to do it. So that'll be interesting to keep an eye on, but I hadn't seen mention of that recently. So that'll be sort of interesting, because airline prices are definitely one of the things that I hear people complain about with regard to their Vegas trips. As far as the cost the average person going to Vegas, it's way more expensive to fly than it used to be.

Speaker 1: 13:04

Yeah, anything that causes you to lose flexibility with your trips. I mean, that's not a good sign. Some of these round trips, it's hit or miss. You're going to sometimes have to leave earlier than you want to leave Vegas. What if it's an open ended thing? You don't know how long you're going to be traveling to your destination, how long you're going to be at your destination. I'm not a fan of it. It's not my thing. But hopefully there'll be better news in the future. Michael, you got anything to say.

Speaker 2: 13:33

I just want to thank everyone for joining us today. We'd love to hear the topics that you're interested in, especially topics that involve traveling to Vegas casino loyalty, travel loyalty. So just throw it at us and since we're going to be doing this, we hope for pretty often we'll be able to get to those questions right away.

Speaker 1: 13:51

All right, Thanks, man. So everybody at home, remember for luxury travel, booking travel, Zork travel. Visit us at travelzorktravelcom to plan your next amazing vacation and please join the conversation on social media. You can find us easily. All social platforms are at travelzork. We'll see you next time.