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...positive and profitable as Las Vegas morphed from a place where people went just to gamble and get a lap dance to a destination where middle Americans wanted to vacation. It became so mainstream that even the Southern Baptists had a convention in the city. "Visitors were coming to hotels at rates of 90% - a signal to expand," Schwer explains. "And interest rates dropped, so there was readily available cash to do just that." Jan Freitag, a hotel analyst at Smith Travel Research, agrees: "There was the sense that if you build it, they will come - that there was this...
...city attracted convention business: 6 million attendees brought in $8 billion of business last year. No other city could compete with the entertainment, parties and number of hotel rooms. "If you put three to a room," says Schwer to illustrate the capacity Vegas has, "you could put the whole population of Wyoming in Vegas and still be able to feed, clothe and give them extra towels." (See 10 things to do in Las Vegas...
...Vegas, in doubling down on the travel sector, had not diversified its economy. As the visitor rate dropped 10% in October, average daily room rates fell 14% and gaming revenue dove 26%. The hotel-casino downturn sent ripples across the city that turned into a tsunami. "In our union halls, 30% of members were what we call travelers," says Steve Holloway of the Las Vegas chapter of the Associated General Contractors of America. "They came here for the work, and now they're going home." The construction industry alone employs 10% of Las Vegas's population...
...Freitag, despite Steve Wynn's recent announcement that he will lower room rates, thinks the picture may not be all gloomy. "If you look at the hotel occupancy rate of 83.5%, well, people in other cities would be ecstatic," says Freitag. "But it's just in Las Vegas, the benchmark is 90%." And while there are reports of some struggling hotels offering free rooms to visitors who gamble as little as $100 at the tables, Scott D. Berman of PricewaterhouseCoopers says the better properties are doing relatively well, at least on weekends. "It's a segmented market," says Berman. "What...
Philip Shalala, head of marketing at the Hard Rock Hotel Las Vegas, says his hotel is having its best December yet - up 6%, year over year. Some of that may be due to creative marketing: the hotel had a holiday party for the city, offering two hours of free wine and beer. "It keeps up the energy of the place," says Shalala, "and it's good for employee morale." People who came in for drinks stayed to eat and gamble; that night the hotel beat its forecast take...