VIP Hosts
© Lauren GreenfieldIn 2009, just over 36-million tourists doled out an average of $93 for a hotel room along The Strip, the epicenter of all things vice in Las Vegas, Nevada. But for anyone with a penchant for spending obscene amounts of money, they can live like royalty with a phone call to a VIP host, a person whose job it is to cater the wishes of high rolling gamblers, celebrities, and businessmen looking for a serious hedonistic streak.
Jon Gray, a gracious 26-year old vice president at the Palms Hotel with a taste for bespoke suits and muscle cars, specializes in indulging the desires of VIPs. Gray can procure access to the trendy nightclubs, prime tables within the hotel’s many restaurants, or luxury suites costing upwards of $35,000 per night that come complete with “show showers” featuring glass walls, stripper poles, and mood lights. On the subject of the showers, Gray says with a laugh, “We’ll get the high rollers a table at the club where girls just happen to be. After that, it’s up to them [the VIP] to get the girls back up to the suite.”
Down The Strip at the Hard Rock Hotel, Tiffany Masters is another kind of VIP host whose specialty is bringing the girls to the clubs where the high rollers just happen to be. Masters, an austere 40-something bombshell mother of a teenage son, operates Cabana Candy, a new service that brings the young, pretty girls with fully enhanced bodies to clubs where VIPs spend $20,000 for a table and keep the champagne flowing (for $1,000 per bottle).On the introductory night of Cabana Candy, the girls party at Vanity, a nightclub in the Hard Rock Hotel, where Masters gets a complimentary table valued at $10,000 in exchange for her service.
Visiting one of the other VIP tables, Masters and her girls come across a jovial group of Canadian businessmen who discovered the latest fad in Las Vegas, “Making It Rain”, named after a hip-hop song by Fat Joe, where they can purchase bricks of cash to throw in the air, in the middle of the club, when the song is played by the DJ. The act of “Making It Rain” and watching as clubbers scramble on the ground for money is a turn-off for Masters, who said with a look of genuine disgust, “Even for Vegas, that’s ghetto.”
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