Cosmopolitan President and CEO Bill McBeath.
Unexpectedly, longtime resort executive John Ceriale shares a time-honored garment with famed frat boy John Blutarsky from the movie “Animal House.”
Toga! Toga! Toga!
“I wore a toga to work,” Ceriale said May 7 during the 11th annual Vallen Dinner of Distinction, at which he was honored as the UNLV William F. Harrah College of Hotel Administration’s Alumnus of the Year. “It’s hard to believe, but I started at Caesars Palace wearing a toga. I really liked it, too, which is the sad thing.”
The event was held at the Cosmopolitan, a befitting locale as Blackstone Group, the company for whom Ceriale works as a top adviser, just bought the high-rising resort. The event is named for resort industry giant and hotel college founding dean Jerry Vallen. On hand in one of his first public appearances on behalf of the hotel was Cosmopolitan President and CEO Bill McBeath, who was hotly pursued by Ceriale to run the 4 1/2-year-old resort and is among the Vallen Dinner’s past honorees.
The setting was glamorous, of course, but Ceriale remembered humbler moments early in his career — in particular, his first job at Caesars. He worked as a mail and information clerk, and a toga was his uniform. This was as he attended school at UNLV.
“I had moved out from Baltimore with a degree from Loyola College, and at that point, if you wanted to be in hospitality, this was the place you could come and work and go to college,” Ceriale said. “This was in the days when you had keys for hotel rooms, and messages were delivered in pneumatic tubes. … It was an amazing thing.”
But Ceriale, whose family was lower-middle class, from modest means, always had an overarching objective to run a resort. He recalls a trip his family took to Atlantic City when he as a 17-year-old junior in high school. As he walked along the boardwalk searching for a restroom, he ducked into the Traymore Hotel. He stopped at a door with “General Manager” painted across the glass.
“I came back upstairs to the boardwalk, and I said to myself, ‘That’s what I want to do with my life, run a hotel like this,’ ” Ceriale recalled. “Corny, right? But that’s a fact.”
Ceriale fulfilled his general manager goal at age 30, working as GM of the Albuquerque Marriott. He joined Blackstone at 46, as a consultant who works with presidents of resorts around the world.
He is well aware that the CEO of the company’s new asset on the Strip helped open Aria and CityCenter next door and thus is competing with his own original vision.
“I think that Aria and CityCenter is an amazing development, and they did a really fantastic job there,” Ceriale said. “But on the flip side, the Cosmopolitan had an amazing opening against people being cynical, and against all odds — with a vertical building, a small footprint, being opened by a bank (Deutsche Bank, which eventually sold the hotel to Blackstone), without a large system in place, like a Wynn or an MGM would have — they positioned this hotel to really find a customer who felt more comfortable in this environment than in, say, a Bellagio or an Aria or even a Wynn. I like all of those hotels, but me, personally, I feel more comfortable here.”
Ceriale, 63, talks of Blackstone’s passion for the Cosmopolitan, its plans for finishing the top four floors of the East Tower, building another bar in the lobby and “many, many capital projects we’re going to do to make this a better place.” But his chief objective, thus far, was landing McBeath.
As Ceriale says, “It was four to five months of me driving him crazy so he would take this job.”
Remarkably, though the two had known each other for several years, McBeath had no idea Ceriale was a UNLV grad until the two had dinner in New York.
“I knew him only as a Cornell guy (Ceriale is on that university’s School of Hotel Administration’s advisory board), and I was incredulous to learn this,” McBeath said. “It just shows that this is a small community.”
Ceriale remains very much a regular guy, joking that, “I own one suit, and I am in it.”
It’s just as well. We need not dig out the outfit he wore at Caesars.
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