“Work was the blood in my life,” he said of those early years at Palms. “I became the gatekeeper of those suites between cash-paying guests and casino guests.”īy this point, Gray was working 100-hour weeks, and moved into the complex at the residential Palms Place tower when it opened in 2008. Shifting the idea of what a top-tier hotel suite could be, Gray helped develop the Suites’ pricing structure and butler program. “The properties would rather the suites sat empty just on the hope that a big player might show up versus selling them for cash rates,” he recalled. “ saw an opportunity to charge premium rates for the big suites,” Gray said, noting that most casinos kept their top suites reserved for high rollers on the gaming floor. Just out of college, Gray began developing the Palms’ Fantasy Suites-at the time, a fairly new concept to Las Vegas. He opened Wynn Las Vegas as a front-desk clerk, where he met George Maloof, at the time a minority owner of the 703-room Palms Casino Resort, with whom the aspiring hotelier built a relationship, and who offered him a job after graduation. “You deal with so much, from billing to guest service to Las Vegas.”īy his senior year, Gray estimates that he was working about 60 hours per week-a “baptism by fire,” as he recalls it. “The front desk is the best way to really experience hospitality,” he said. Working full-time and studying full-time gave him the “best of both worlds,” and he learned quickly about many different facets of the industry. “Hospitality is such a big part of the school program that you're kind of exposed to it indirectly, anyway.” he said. He started studying hospitality management, but since he was getting experience in that field through his night job, he changed tracks and earned his bachelor’s degree in business management instead.īut even studying business at UNLV meant studying how hotels operate. “I knew that it was something that I wanted to continue to pursue,” he said. As a student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, he worked the graveyard shift as a front-desk clerk at Bally’s-and found himself bit by the hospitality bug. As a child in central Nevada, he would visit his grandparents in the city, and loved walking up and down the Strip, admiring the casino lights.

Las Vegas was in Jon Gray’s blood long before he became the GM of the Las Vegas Palms Casino Resort-and one of the youngest GMs in the city.

Does station casinos own the palms