We went to the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center to see the Sammy Hagar show last month. The venue is in a great spot downtown that allowed for easy access to restaurants and bars which was great. I was a little skeptical about the sound quality and the comfort (crowd) but the place was actually pretty cool with excellent sound quality. There are also a very ample number of restrooms, which is a big problem at a number of other places. Unfortunately, the bad far outweighs the good with regards to the DLVEC.
We had tickets at will call and once we got to the window it still took about 20 minutes for the staff to find us on their list. I showed them the confirmation email on my phone, but they continued to search their obviously cumbersome and/or antiquated system of finding tickets. I wrote this off as first event bugs that needed to be worked out and we moved on.
The space is cavernous and while there are no seats in the GA area that's fine by me because who sits down at a good show, right? I will say that I'm glad we didn't pay for VIP seating. Most of the VIP area was significantly further away for the stage than we were in GA. The VIP tickets were about 2 1/2 times what we paid and that is hardly worth it just to have a chair.
The drink lines were by far the worst I've ever encountered at an event and that includes lines I've been in at NHL and MLB playoff games in packed stadiums. We were in line for over 1 hour and were basically forced to buy multiple drink as opposed to standing in line again. When we reached to front of the line we saw that there was a single bartender and one bar back at each of the two service areas. Given the price of the drinks they could have had 2 or 3 bartenders on each side and still raked in tens of thousands of dollars. I was nearly force to hit the PBR line which was significantly shorter.
My hope is that the folks that run the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center take a look at some of these reviews and take heed to the advice given. This venue has the potential to be a great place to see a show with a little fine tuning by the management. I'm hoping to be able to do a follow-up in the future that is more positive.