The famed “Army” of fans who follow the K-pop group BTS invaded Las Vegas earlier this month, with more than 200,000 fans attending four shows over two weekends at Allegiant Stadium, according to reports.
Stadium Tech Report field scout Delaney Carnes was in attendance at one of the shows on the weekend of April 16-17, and reported nothing but smooth operations in regards to entry procedures and in-venue wireless connectivity.
“Even though there was a giant horde of fans showing up, we didn’t wait long in any of the lines for security or ticketing,” Carnes said. “It all went really fast.”
Monorails and trams
If there has been an issue this past year with events at Allegiant Stadium (which only started allowing full houses last summer) it’s the process of fans in Las Vegas getting to the stadium, which sits across the highway from the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. But according to Carnes, even her cross-Vegas “commute” from the Westgate hotel (the old Hilton, next to the convention center) was pretty painless, starting with a trip on the Las Vegas Monorail from Westgate to the MGM Grand. From there, her group walked across the corner of Las Vegas Boulevard to the Excalibur, where they caught a tram to Mandalay Bay.
Then, like many other attendees, they walked across the highway on Hacienda Boulevard, which is typically closed for Allegiant Stadium events like Las Vegas Raiders games. “It’s a little bit of a walk but it wasn’t too bad,” Carnes said.
Plenty of security gates
In what was probably a very conscious strategy, Allegiant Stadium had a large number of gates available for security screening, which Carnes said went quickly even though Allegiant Stadium still uses the older metal-detector type gates, which can require fans to remove items from pockets and purses. “There were a ton of gates open — it looked like they stretched all the way around the stadium,” Carnes said.
Right after security, fans had tickets checked by staff using handheld scanners. “Once we got through security, we didn’t wait at all — we got our tickets scanned and went right in,” said Carnes, who said her group arrived about an hour and a half before the scheduled show start time.
Once inside in her seat, Carnes said the fan-facing Wi-Fi network at Allegiant Stadium performed well, getting a speedtest of 42.42 Mbps on the download, and 30.17 Mbps on upload just before the show started. “We had no problems connecting [to the Wi-Fi network],” Carnes said.
While the return trip to the hotel had slightly longer waits for trams and monorail cars, Carnes said her group still made it all the way back from the stadium in less than an hour. “It was just a great time,” Carnes said. “Everything went smoothly.”
