Stephanie Arone

| Straight Shooter |
Stephanie Arone
President, General Manager and Director of Sales,
Activity Planners Inc.

Las Vegas, Nevada
Age: 39

How did a no-nonsense, native New Yorker like Stephanie Arone end up as a major event player in “anything goes” Las Vegas? “Accidentally. I didn’t even know that destination management was an industry,” she says. After graduating from New York’s Pace University in 1994, Arone, DCMP, left her future as a Wall Street commuter behind for the glitz and glamour of a keno runner job at Vegas’ Fiesta Casino Hotel—“perhaps the lowest rung on the Vegas employee ladder,” she admits. That foot in the hospitality industry door, though, quickly led to a human relations position managing Fiesta’s training and orientation. In 1997, when veteran Vegas DMC Karen Gordon was looking for another creative mind, Arone won the job over some stiff competition. She took over Activity Planners after Gordon’s retirement last year, and she’s already built a repeat client rate of 60 to 65 percent in ultra-competitive Vegas with her hands-on, straight-shooting approach. In her rare spare time, Arone gives back to both her profession (through MPI, PCMA, the ADME and the Las Vegas Hospitality Association) and her community as a board member with the Patrick Kelly Youth Foundation, which provides scholarships for underprivileged youths.

—M. Boisclair