Moon Sees What’s in the Stars


Ask 39-year industry veteran Valerie Moon about the good old days and she’ll take you on a colorful trip down memory lane. Beginning with her stint at the bell desk of the Sahara Hotel & Casino and on through a career that included stops in the sales divisions of several Strip resorts, Moon always believed meetings and conventions were the wave of the future for Las Vegas.

Now, as director of sales at the Excalibur Hotel-Casino, Moon says the meteoric rise of tradeshows in Las Vegas has come as no surprise to her. TSW Contributing Editor Lisa Plummer set out to learn if Moon has a crystal ball or is merely a woman with vision.

Question: Early in your career you were in the incentive travel business. How did you transition into meetings and conventions?
Answer: I was working for the Del Webb Corp., a casino hotel operator that decided it wanted to be an incentive company. That evolved into a charter market for the leisure market, (which included) meetings and conventions.

Q: How did you then go from meeting planning to convention sales?
A: I was with a couple of different tour operators, (then) came back to Las Vegas in the late ’70s to work at the Dunes Hotel. I stayed on the tour and travel side until I got to the Frontier, where I evolved into vice president of sales. I really took hold of the meeting and conventions side.

Q: When did you first see that conventions could be important to Las Vegas?
A: I just thought (conventions were) a great idea, a great business opportunity, and it intrigued me. When I worked for Boyd Gaming I used to tell Bill Boyd constantly, ‘We need more square footage; we need more meeting space!’ I was kind of the nag in the room.
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TSW Las Vegas is edited by Heidi Genoist, senior editor of Tradeshow Week. She can be reached at
(702) 366-1517, or by email at hgenoist@reedbusiness.com.

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