LVCVA vows to bring back fireworks next year

Monday, Jan. 10, 2000 | 11:15 a.m.

The chief promoter of Las Vegas says the widely criticized lack of fireworks here on New Year's Eve is a situation that won't happen again.

Manny Cortez, president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said that when faced with forecasts of low New Year's hotel room occupancy late in 1999, the local resort industry and tourism promoters decided to spend money on advertising to lure visitors as opposed to using the money to stage a fireworks show.

While not calling this decision an outright mistake, Cortez said it's not likely to be repeated.

"This is the first year I can recall we didn't have fireworks, and I can assure you we'll probably have them next year," Cortez said during an interview Friday on POV Vegas, a Las Vegas Sun television news discussion show on the cable channel Las Vegas 1.

He said hotel-casinos spent an unprecedented $60 million on entertainment for their guests, bringing in the likes of Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler; and this entertainment attracted worldwide attention for the city.

"We just didn't visually entertain the rest of the world with fireworks," Cortez said. "Frankly we were outdone by the rest of the world. I don't think that'll happen again."

"(But) I don't see it as a major factor that will keep people from coming to Las Vegas next year," he said.

A late-1999 advertising blitz was launched by the LVCVA in hopes of attracting people who otherwise planned to stay home, and Cortez said this paid off with an occupancy rate of 91 percent on New Year's Eve -- a percentage he said was higher than anywhere else in the world.

"That (fireworks) may have been something that was overlooked, but at the end of the day the entire New Year's weekend in terms of entertainment, economic impact and number of visitors and occupancy was a big hit for Las Vegas," Cortez said.

Despite Cortez's upbeat assessment, the stock of Mandalay Resort Group sunk 20 percent in one day last week when the big hotel-casino operator reported a shortage of visitors on New Year's Eve at its Strip resorts. Analysts, however, said Mandalay may have more fundamental problems.

Cortez said that despite the criticism the city received for its failure to provide fireworks or some other major public entertainment event on New Year's Eve, Las Vegas finished the year with a healthy visitor count of an estimated 33 million people -- up 10 percent from 1998. And for 2000, the LVCVA projects visitor volume of 35 million, up 5.5 percent from 1999.

He said Las Vegas, faced with the proliferation of gambling nationwide, is successfully marketing itself as a complete resort destination with such amenities as world-class dining and shopping.

The key to to the future is attracting more international visitors, Cortez said, and the city is making great progress with direct flights from Tokyo and the June launch of nonstop flights from London.

LVCVA marketers are also in discussions with a carrier interested in direct flights from Australia, Cortez said. He declined to name the carrier.

And the LVCVA hopes to talk to airlines about the possibility of direct flights from nations in Central America and South America including Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela, Cortez said.