A tournament weekend on the Strip brings in an audience that mostly did not drive here from Henderson. Families, alumni and college hockey people fly in, rent something, and spend three days navigating a city whose parking rules are not intuitive if you did not grow up with them. A fair number of weekend headaches start there, and almost none of them involve hockey.
Las Vegas has an unusual density of private lots. Apartment complexes, retail centers, gated communities and office buildings around the resort corridor set their own parking policies and enforce them, which is legal and clearly signed if you read the sign. Visitors treat a half-empty lot near the arena as an obvious solution. The lot's owner treats it as private property with posted terms. The car is not stolen. It has been relocated, and there is a process for getting it back.
That process is the part nobody knows in advance. A vehicle removed from private property is generally taken to a storage yard, and retrieving it involves identification and paperwork that matches the registration. Rental cars complicate this, because the name on the registration belongs to a rental company. Knowing which yard has the car, and what to bring, turns a lost afternoon into an hour.
There is a second version for teams and their families, which is the loaded vehicle. Equipment bags, sticks and gear travel in rented SUVs and vans, and a vehicle that gets relocated with all of it inside becomes a scheduling problem rather than an inconvenience. Nobody wants to explain to a coach that the pads are in a storage yard on the other side of town during a game window.
The companies doing that work are also the ones answering the phone when a rental will not start in the arena garage. Las Vegas Towing publishes both sides of its business openly, from vehicle impounds, illegal parking and abandoned vehicle removal on the property side to jump starts, lockouts and tire changes on the roadside side. Visitors who would rather understand the mechanics before they need them can read the company's breakdown of impound and roadside work.
For a tournament weekend the useful preparation is small. Photograph the sign wherever you park, so you know whose lot it is. Keep the rental agreement in your phone rather than the glovebox, since the glovebox may be inside the car you are trying to recover. Note the cross streets and not just the venue. And if a car is missing, start with the posted contact on the lot rather than a theft report, because the sign usually names who removed it.