Crowds return to LV Strip

Monday, Oct. 1, 2001 | 10:46 a.m.

Traffic jams and long lines never looked so good.

McCarran International Airport was jammed with four-hour lines Sunday and the city's hotel rooms were being filled at near-normal rates over the weekend as Las Vegas continued bouncing back from a tourism downturn spawned by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Terry Jicinsky, the head of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority's research department, said this morning that it was too early to tell what the city's occupancy rate was for the weekend -- the third since planes were grounded and travel was reduced to a crawl following the East Coast attacks.

However, he said some of the initial occupancy reports that were faxed to him by on- and off-Strip properties "looked good." The LVCVA had projected an 84 percent occupancy rate for the weekend. The average occupancy of hotels and motels in 2000 was 89.1 percent.

Room rates, however, were likely weak over the weekend as prices fell to attract visitors.

Occupancy at the Rio hotel-casino was 97.5 percent and Harrah's Las Vegas was 98.5 percent on Friday night and both hotels were full Saturday, spokesman Gary Thompson said today.

At McCarran, ticket counters at Southwest Airlines and America West Airlines, the two largest carriers serving Las Vegas, were swamped, said Hilarie Grey, a spokeswoman for the airport.

Because heightened security measures are in effect and Southwest was running close to capacity Sunday, lines were long, Grey said.

She said at some points during the day, ticket counter lines for baggage check-in were four hours long at Southwest and employees were helping passengers by assisting those with the earliest flights first.

"That doesn't make people in the back of the line very happy," Grey said. "I think they were more understanding a couple of weeks ago (when there were long lines to accommodate passengers stranded by the grounding of planes) than they are now."

Security check-in lines also were long with the lengths fluctuating throughout the day. The longest wait, Grey said, was about 30 minutes.

McCarran called in off-duty employees to help move traffic, she said.