Vegas Monorail up and running

The vision of a transit system that is up to par with the glamorous image of Las Vegas has finally come to life. The Las Vegas Monorail opened its doors to its first slew of riders July 15.

The project, which raised, both through bonds and investors, a sum of $650 million, has enough of a surplus left now that the first phase is built to last several years in the event the monorail doesn't raise a dime. But Patrick Pharris, president and chief executive officer of Promethean Partners, is confident that the train will become as much of an attraction as it is a convenience.

"The monorail is more than a simple mode of transportation," Pharris said. "It's also more than an icon attraction of the most visited city in the world."

The idea of the monorail generated from Francois Badeau, Transmax chairman, in the early '90s. Even before the huge boom in population and visitors, Badeau shared ideas with Bob Maxey of MGM Mirage, who saw the transporting of tourists to be problematic. Maxey discussed the possibility of a system that connected MGM to other hotels with Arthur Goldberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Bally's.

Those two hotels, more than a decade later, are now the first two stops on the monorail, after the wedding chapel at Bally's had to be removed in order for the stop to be built.

"Maxey said, if you don't start moving people around the most visited city in the world in a better way, people will start looking at other destinations," Pharris said. "If they do that it hurts the whole economy."

Permits were granted and funds were raised. The concept was to have, initially, seven stops in front of major hotels on the Strip, running south to north. The sites are MGM Grand, Bally's, Paris Las Vegas, Flamingo Las Vegas, Harrah's Las Vegas/Imperial Palace, the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Hilton and the Sahara. From south to north, a train ride through all the current spots takes approximately 14 minutes and costs around $3.50 although multi-ride passes are available.

After the idea was a go and funds were secure, the question was raised of how to keep the system functioning and making money for the investors and the Las Vegas Monorail Company. Pharris knew he had to get some heavy hitting advertisers on board, and he needed to make their products jump out at the millions of visitors that would potentially ride the trains.

Rodney Sacks, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Hansen's Beverage Co., was the first advertiser on board. Sacks said he knew immediately the potential of the train and its impact on customers. In addition to funding advertising for a Monster energy drink train, Hanson's has the vending rights at all the stops.

"We were the first corporate entity to see a great promotional opportunity in conjunction with the monorail," Sacks said. "We created a platform that was far more than what you'd expect out of a monorail. If you had taken a traditional bus, for instance, you can buy a billboard. It's two dimensional, it's flat, and it's not alive. What we saw, is that we could not only put an advertisement on the outside, but do the same thing inside."

A passenger who rides each train supported by an advertiser, including Nextel, Paramount and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, will be totally immersed in the experience of the product or world of the advertiser.

The Monster train hosts televisions showing extreme sports athletes and footage from the Vans Warp Tour, in which the Monster Energy drink was a major sponsor. The three-dimensional aspect of the train, according to Sacks, portrays not just the beverage they're trying to introduce, but the lifestyle associated with it.

" It's extensively decorated," Sacks said. "When you create a different feeling, you increase an awareness level. When we added television monitors, we have a tremendous reach to extreme sports, to a lifestyle our product conveys that we're able to convey and immerse consumers with.

"You have to make a connection strong enough between awareness and the purchase or usage occasion. The longer the space of time from when a consumer saw it to when he remembers what he saw in the ad, the more likely he is to forget it. We've also secured vending rights so people can buy it. We will have taken them through an entire experience that in marketing terms is many times more valuable than traditional advertising."

Phase 2 of the monorail has been approved and is slated to stop at Fremont Street, the Stratosphere and two other stops in downtown areas and will be opened in approximately six months. Phase 3 will add a stop to McCarran International Airport.

Pharris said now that the train is functioning, his phone is ringing off the hook with major corporations hoping to secure a train on the monorail. It wasn't that way several years ago when he was cold-calling people looking for potential advertisers.

"What our plan said was that people come here from all over the country and there are lots of them," Pharris said. "We will have people in a captive environment and provide them with well executed advertising.

"The problem is most people look at public transit as a punishment so we needed to make it an exciting, entertaining, pleasurable experience so people will want to ride the system.

"There are video screens. The floor is imaged. It's dynamic. It becomes the talk of the town. You've provided a gridlock city with a transit system that's sexy as hell. It has all the things it needs for a public transit system, but we've taken from punishment to a form of entertainment."

Pharris also believes that just like the fountain show at Bellagio or other comparable sights to behold or experiences to be had, the Las Vegas Monorail will become one of the things tourists love to do when they visit.

"It's an immersive and experiential marketing environment," he said. "It drives traffic and revenue and it makes that additional artery of transportation more valuable than ever imagined. For people who come here, 80 percent of decisions made regarding what to do in Las Vegas happen once people get here, and the Las Vegas Monorail is going to be a forethought."


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