By Edward Chaykovsky
MGM Resorts International made a huge payday from Saturday's highly anticipated welterweight unification between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. The MGM Grand hosted the fight, but 10 of the MGM Resorts’ Las Vegas casinos saw heavy betting figures.
MGM Resorts Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jim Murren told Bloomberg that revenue from hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip rose 30 percent for the weekend.
“We haven’t seen these kinds of numbers, you’d have to go back to Mike Tyson in his heyday to get anywhere near,” Murren said in an interview.
MGM Resorts gets the bulk of its revenue from Las Vegas, from resorts such as Bellagio and MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Mirage and others.
Murren said ticket sales at the MGM Grand, which seats 16,200, generated a record $70 million. He says they also sold 46,000 tickets to watch the fight on closed-circuit, generating another $9 million.
The fight also broke the record for private planes being parked at Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport. He says they were forced to divert planes to the airport in North Las Vegas after parking 500 planes. Murren said the previous record set during a Super Bowl was 350 aircrafts.
