Looking California, Still Feeling Minnesota
April 10, 2010
Tourism numbers for February 2010 have been released, and I find them a little more difficult to dissect than usual:
Las Vegas Strip Crowd
Las Vegas Strip Crowd
According to the LVCVA, the city of Las Vegas hosted about the same number of visitors in February as it did in the same month last year.
But the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority said Thursday that the nearly 2.9 million visitors in February meant $117 million more to casinos in gambling revenue than in 2009.
The agency says that with more than 8,000 more hotel rooms to fill than last year, nightly rates and occupancy levels were down.
Officials say convention attendance in February was down 11 percent compared with a year ago.
The agency says more people are arriving in Las Vegas from California by car, than by airline flights.
Officials say 5.7 million people have visited Las Vegas so far this year.
Basically everything is down, or the same, except for gaming revenue.
While $117 million in increased gaming take is nothing to sneeze at, this does not factor in hotel losses from falling room rates and occupancy levels. If I had to take a wild guess, when all is said and done, February of 2010 will have been worse than February of 2009.
Frankly, I am a little bit surprised by this. Given the strong finish to last year, and the fact that City Center is now open, I thought the strength would carry over through at least the first half of this year. I also assumed that the “Who Dat” Super Bowl weekend was going to result in stronger numbers.
The other thing that stands out in these numbers is the increasing percentage of Californians visiting Las Vegas, and whether this is a good or bad thing will completely depend on who you ask.
There are people in Las Vegas that love Californians and attribute much of the success of Vegas to its close ties with CA, and others who feel that Californians swoop in and pick at the carcass of Las Vegas every chance they get. I have heard it opined that Vegas would be better off if we built a Berlin Wall at the Nevada/California border.
Personally, I fall somewhere in between these two extremes, although I lean toward the latter.
While it is undeniable that Las Vegas’s early rise was due to it being a de-facto suburb of Los Angeles, in my opinion, our proximity to the Golden State has been a net negative over the past 10 years.
It is my firmly held belief that foreign speculators (of which Californians were a majority) were the largest cause of our housing implosion, and I also believe that the California demographic was instrumental in changing the direction of Las Vegas in the mid-2000’s … probably for the worse.
For years, Middle America seemed to fall in love with the cartoony nature of Las Vegas, but sometime in the early 2000’s, moneyed California metrosexuals began looking down their noses at our “tacky” themes.
Circus Circus and the Excalibur became places where procreating trailer park losers brought their families on vacation, and it was soooo not hip.
This being the case, many of our neighbors to the West began calling for resorts with amazing design elements, amazing restaurants, amazing bars, amaz … well, just amazing everything. To be honest, I still don’t know what “amazing” means in the context that 35-and-unders use it, but I do know that every hotel ever built by Steve Wynn is, indeed, amazing.
Of course, it was not just the metrosexual crowd that steered Las Vegas away from a formula that was serving the town well.
California celebutantes like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, etc decided they wanted to recreate the Club Kid scene of the 70’s and 80’s. The casino owners complied, extended a middle finger to the homely, slightly overweight gamblers from Minnesota, and the rest is history.
We’ve now got a town in the middle of a recession with an identity crisis.
I hereby concede that everything above is a sweeping generalization, and is grossly unfair to those California visitors who don’t have an identity crisis (all 3 of them), but the fact is … Californians have always been a mixed blessing for Las Vegas.
Every town has its necessary evils, and Californians are ours. At least they appear to be trying to hold our head above water until the hideous “themers” emerge from their midwestern igloos and once again resume their normal travel patterns.
Until that happens, it appears that our upward trend has stalled, at least for now — and we are back to the status-quo.
If anything is clear from this latest release, it is that optimism, my own included, may have been misplaced. While the conventional and oft-repeated wisdom around town is that “the worst is behind us”, I don’t think any of us are 100% convinced that it is.
All of this being said, when numbers are released next month, I will be very surprised if March 2010 does not show a major increase over the prior year.
Strictly from eyeballing it, it appeared to me that March, especially the period around St. Patrick’s Day, was the demarcation line for a huge uptick in visitors.
Whether that translates into real dollars remains to be seen.
Written by ColinFromLasVegas on April 11, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Whenever the LVCVA says anything nowadays, I too am suspicious. Because, as you know, Rex, in the past, they always have this flowery interpretation of numbers and try to fabricate positives out of a high volume of negative numbers and statistics. Believing them is pretty much the same as placing trust in a brakes engineer who works for Toyota.
I know you’ve pissed them off in the past. Especially Mr. Fucking Randy Fucking Snow. I too think they are shit and sit in offices and try to figure out catch phrases that don’t work. This justifies them getting paid six digit dollar figures every year.
One instance I will never forgive them assholes for doing was when they tried to victimize the locals who live here. Last year when the economic downturn hit Las Vegas tourism so fast and so bad, the LVCVA tried this campaign to get locals to patronize casinos along the Strip. Not because they like us, but because they weren’t getting tourists to Las Vegas, so they tried to make up for it by using locals. They had these specials for locals. And all they were was shit they would give tourists as “comps” if they gambled and spent alot of money. It was all so transparent. And it was revealed very, very quickly and that advertising gimmick died a quick death; revealed for the crap it was. And it also died out because the casino owners basically don’t want locals in there, no matter if the economy sucks. And even the people who work in Strip casinos believe to their very soul that locals don’t tip. So they prefer tourists, who they look at as big tippers. So, Mr. Fucking Randy Fucking Snow got slapped by the locals really quick on that one. We live and work in Las Vegas. We’re not shills to be taken advantage of. Las Vegas is not a damn circus, Mr. Fucking Randy Fucking Snow. Respect us and we’ll respect you, you asshole.
Anyways, I’ve always said fire all them assholes and put Rex from Rexville in charge. A round of frozen custard for everyone.