If you've had the opportunity to attend an event at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas — be it a UNLV or Las Vegas Raiders' football game, international soccer match or concert — there’s a good chance Samantha Banz and Nolan Miles helped shape your experience.
No, neither are athletes nor performers. Rather, the two Hospitality College alums serve integral guest experience roles through separate jobs at the stadium.
Banz, a 2017 graduate of the William F. Harrah College of Hospitality, is the senior premium suites manager for Silver & Black Hospitality (Levy Restaurants), which handles food and beverage operations at Allegiant. Her primary responsibility: Ensure that the stadium’s 127 VIP suites and eight club spaces are properly set up and stocked with the food and drink items specified by guests.
Meanwhile, Miles has been working on the front lines at Allegiant since October 2021 as a guest experience representative. Miles, who completed his hospitality degree in December, is charged with everything from addressing ticketing issues to relocating guests with ADA-specific needs to overseeing photo opportunities and giveaways for kids.
Banz and Miles are part of a new generation of students who have confronted the traditional hospitality vocational path — hotels, casinos, restaurants, resorts — and opted for a new fork in the road: careers in stadium and arena management.
“Over the last few years, Las Vegas has become the center of the sports and entertainment world — especially with the Raiders and Golden Knights coming to town and talks of a Major League Baseball and/or NBA team coming next,” Miles says. “Also, The Sphere [just off] the Strip is going to be one of the most exciting concert venues in the world.
“But it’s not just Las Vegas. Stadium and arena management can take you anywhere in the world.”
Banz and Miles share more than just a common career interest and workplace. Both arrived in Las Vegas from faraway lands — she from Switzerland, he from Guam.
Banz was immersed in hospitality from birth, as her family has operated a restaurant just outside Zurich for three generations. (It initially had a bed-and-breakfast component.)
Both her parents went the hospitality route, as did her uncle who once served as an executive chef for Hilton Hotels.
As a youngster, Banz periodically worked at the restaurant her great-grandparents opened. But although she had hospitality in her blood, she had absolutely no desire to follow in the family footsteps as an adolescent.
“Growing up, every conversation — whether it was with my parents, grandparents, cousins’ parents or at any family gathering — was centered around food, hospitality and guest service,” she recalls. “And my cousin and I would look at each other and say, ‘Who cares how this was cooked? We’re never going into food and beverage!’”
Banz began to have a change of heart during her junior year of high school. That’s when her family — which by then had relocated to Portland, Oregon — took a trip to Las Vegas around Christmas in 2011.
“That first visit to Vegas sparked a bit of a thrill in me, seeing all the huge hotels and how vibrant the city was,” she says. “After that, I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to give this a shot.’”
By July 2012, Banz and her family had left Portland for Las Vegas, and she spent her senior year at Liberty High School.
From there, Banz enrolled at UNLV and decided to major in hospitality. She chose the event management concentration because it “allowed me to be a little more creative and operational.”
During her time as a Rebel, Banz helped plan the 2016 presidential debate dinner hosted by the UNLV Foundation. She also assisted with two annual Hospitality College events: UNLVino and the Vallen dinner.
“All those things ended up speaking to me a lot more than the traditional concierge/front desk/restaurant management portion of the hospitality industry,” she says.
However, it wasn’t until 2016 that Banz found her true calling. She landed a part-time premium guest services job at brand-new T-Mobile Arena, the state-of-the-art venue on the Las Vegas Strip.
She then parlayed that into an internship that she more or less crafted herself after striking up a conversation with one of the arena’s executives. That internship was a crash course in all aspects of arena operations, from sales and finance to marketing and engineering.
Cut to five years later and Banz, 27, already has ascended to a senior manager position with Levy Restaurants. And her “office” is one of the world’s newest and most dazzling multi-purpose stadiums.
“I’ve gotten to take all of the traditional hospitality elements that I learned at UNLV and apply them in a much more creative, modern, and exciting way,” Banz says. “It’s still guest service, it’s still customer service. But you always get to experience something new. That’s the part I love most about the job.”
Growing up on Guam, Miles had a front-row seat to the world of hospitality, as tourism is the primary economic driver for the island nation and U.S. territory. So as his interest in the industry blossomed in high school, he began considering his university options.
That included going an unconventional route: studying abroad.
“Not a lot of people who grow up in Guam leave the island to attend college,” he says.
However, Miles’ grandparents live in Las Vegas, so he was familiar with the city. And after doing some research, he learned that UNLV was home to a world-renowned hospitality program. So he took advantage of a financial-aid offer that waives out-of-state tuition fees for residents of certain states and U.S. territories, and enrolled at UNLV.
The plan: Study hotel-casino management, earn a degree, return to Guam and work at one of the island’s resorts.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Miles opted to head back to Guam, where he got a job and took a year off school. By the time he returned to UNLV in summer 2021, a massive, $1.8 billion stadium had sprouted from the desert floor just a few miles from campus.
As soon as he got a glimpse of it, Miles was mesmerized.
“It’s such a beautiful-looking building from the outside,” he says. “As someone who grew up a huge sports fan, I took one look at it and said, ‘I want to work there!’”
As a guest services representative for stadium operator ASM Global, Miles’ primary job is to welcome ticket holders to the venue, answer questions and quickly address and resolve problems when they arise.
He equates his role to that of a front-desk agent at a hotel.
“After I got the job at Allegiant, I immediately thought a lot of the hospitality elements we were learning in the program and how they could be applied to sports and entertainment as well,” he says. “The guest experience and customer service aspect of the job really drew me in.”
So much so that Miles has pivoted from his original plan of returning to Guam and working in the hotel industry. The new plan?
“My career ladder as I see it is to hopefully get into events [leadership] and possibly [grow into] assistant general manager and general manager positions,” he says. “I’m looking at this guest experience position as a bit of a stepping stone.”
Where the next stepping stone leads the 22-year-old remains to be seen. But one thing Miles is certain of is that old-school hospitality has infiltrated the modern day sports and entertainment industries. And it’s not going away.
“I think what people are really looking for in sports and entertainment experiences is the same as what they’re looking for in their hotel stays and vacation trips — those personalized experiences,” he says. “That’s where hospitality merges with the sports industry — creating these unforgettable, unique experiences.”
And with Las Vegas’ professional sports portfolio growing seemingly by the month — and more entertainment venues on the horizon — opportunities will be plentiful for UNLV Hospitality College students interested in traveling the same career paths as alums like Miles and Banz.
“When I started at UNLV, sports and entertainment wasn’t necessarily a path that was given to students,” Banz says. “It was, ‘Pick a concentration — food and beverage, events, or a casino.’ Now it can be events and food and beverage. So students no longer need to be siloed into traditional hospitality careers. There’s so much more to it.
“Sports and events management is now an industry in itself within the broader scope of hospitality. Getting to be part of that has been a thrill.”
