Comdex Las Vegas and the Pink Flamingo

Channeling memories of Zig Ziglar

It was November 1993 and I was about to spend about 18 hours getting from Auckland to Las Vegas to go to COMDEX Fall. I was booked Business Class on Air New Zealand 747 flight NZ6 to Los Angeles.

I hated those flights because you can’t do much with your day. You pack in the morning. you’re ready and it’s 9 am. Your wife’s gone to work. It’s just you and your luggage. Then the rest of the day you wait. The flight didn’t leave for another 12 hours.

I couldn’t sleep on planes, and during this time a company had set up in Mt Eden called the Belleview Clinic. They had 2 sensory deprivation float tanks. I was a regular visitor there and I will tell more stories about that sometime.

This photo is a more modern one that I go to when I can at Float Culture, coincidentally also in Mt Eden.

To keep it short, I discovered that a 1-hour float gave me the equivalent of a night’s rest and so when I was on these flights, I would often stop in and have a float on the way to the airport. I hardly ever manage to sleep on planes, even on 30-hour trips to Europe, so this was a great way to reduce the impact of jetlag.

This was the time when a lot of artists were performing Unplugged on MTV and one of the great sessions was Eric Clapton. I listened to the album on the plane and one of my favourite bittersweet tracks I listened to was Tears in Heaven.

The song was about Clapton’s son Conor’s death, having fallen from the 54th-floor window of an NYC apartment building. It also reminded me of people I had lost. I did learn to play it because it is a beautiful piece of music, but it’s so sad that I haven’t played it since I learned it way back when.

Anyway, I arrived in LA which was uneventful, joined another flight to Las Vegas and arrived early in the morning. This was my first time in Vegas and flying in I got a great view of the strip, the suburbs and the surrounding desert.

Disembarking and walking into the main hall, I was amazed. There were poker machines all over the airport, I guess for people who were going home after their vacations and had a few last coins to donate. I have photos, but I don’t know which remote drive they are on. I will add them one day when I locate them.

There were shuttles everywhere because COMDEX was one of the biggest conferences Vegas hosted. I found one that took me to my Hotel, the Pink Flamingo.

It was in the perfect location, as my travel agent had told me. Right in the middle of the strip and handy for everything. There were actually pink flamingos walking in tropical gardens around the hotel!

I stood patiently in line at check-in for about half an hour, as there were several of us booking in. Finally, it was my turn. I gave them my name, not expecting my room to be ready yet, as often happened when I arrived at my destinations before noon.

The woman behind the counter looked on the computer and back at me, saying “I’m sorry sir, but we have no booking in your name.” I wasn’t phased, I knew it was all organised and showed them my booking which included a confirmation number from the hotel.

“I can see you have a booking on that itinerary, Sir, but you are not in our reservation system, and we are booked solid. We don’t have any spare rooms. It’s COMDEX you know.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve come all the way from New Zealand to attend it. I have paid to stay here for a week. I can’t just go somewhere else and pay again!”

“You’ll be lucky to find anything anywhere, Sir, but I can ring around for you.

I said I would call my travel agent to clear things up. Maybe it was in the wrong name or something. I tried calling my agent but got her voicemail.

Then I realised it was 3 AM back in New Zealand.

I was tired and frustrated. I hadn’t slept for more than 24 hours and, while I didn’t expect to find my room ready, I had thought, maybe a walk around the strip and then a few hours rest on a bed, and my agent recommended the Flamingo because of its central location and good reputation.

They had no solution, but I wasn’t leaving the counter. It was time to think laterally.

When I was doing my sales training, I belonged to a chapter of SWAP, aka Sales Reps with a Purpose. We would meet once a month for a business breakfast. We would start off with a bit of networking, and share leads, then we would stand up before listening to a guest speaker and shout in unison. “I’m alive, I’m well, and I feel great!” Sounds corny doesn’t it, and it felt a bit corny too, maybe a bit too American for us passive Kiwis.

There was usually merchandise for sale, most of it motivational training material, or books written by the guest speaker, which you felt obliged to buy and get autographed.

The materials were usually American, Tom Hopkins was a favourite, and another was Zig Ziglar. It took me a while to even understand what Zig was saying, but once I got used to the accent, I loved his tapes. One of his top sayings was “You can have whatever you want, as long as you give other people what they want.”

I remembered a story on one of my tapes. He told a story about being in the same predicament as me. He shared the following abridged conversation with the woman behind the counter.

“Do you consider yourself to be an honest woman?”

“I certainly do,” she answered.

“If the President of the United States were to walk through the door and come up to you and said ‘I want a room’, “Now tell me the truth, would you have one for him?”

Cutting the story and the quote short, she said she would, and he said, “You and I both know that the President is not going to come into this hotel today and ask for a room. I’ll have his room.”

Back to the Flamingo. I had nothing to lose. So I tried it. I remembered that cassette tape because I had listened to it several times. I asked her the same question, and she said “Of course, we would find one for him.”

I said to her, “Well I can’t afford the presidential suite, but I’d be happy to take the one you keep for emergencies, I don’t care if it’s next to the broom closet. “

Well, guess what? She found me a room that was booked for the following day, but it was free that night, and if I was happy to wait a couple of hours, I was welcome to take that, and meanwhile, they would try to find me another hotel for the rest of my stay.

The next day I had to move. I could stay on the strip, but have to move again after 3 nights. I didn’t want that, so I went with the last option they could find for me, which was the Golden Nugget, which was well away from the strip. I’ll leave that for another post. My travel agent was very apologetic. She owed me one, and in fairness she did. My annual travel budget with her was in the 6 figures a year. I took qualifying dealers to conferences all over the world once a year as well as travelling 1 day in 3 myself.