LV casinos start coming back to life

Angie Wagner

Monday, Sept. 24, 2001 | 9:39 a.m.

They're back. Not all of them, but tourists are once again stuffing quarters into slot machines and checking into Las Vegas hotels. The weekend after missing visitors made the Las Vegas Strip look like a ghost town, casinos were slowly getting their business back.

"We're going to stay and have a good time," Sherry Diedrich of Sheboygan County, Wis., said Saturday as she played a quarter slot machine at Caesars Palace." I wasn't going to live my life scared."

That's the attitude the city's casinos are counting on to help them rebound from the poor visitor volume since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the East Coast.

Tourists were expected to fill 73 percent of the city's hotel rooms this weekend, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority predicted Friday. On a normal weekend, visitors fill about 94 percent of the city's 126,083 hotel rooms.

The 73 percent isn't great, but it's much improved from last weekend, when a little more than half of the 75,000 rooms on the Strip were empty.

Slot machines were eerily silent last weekend and many card dealers didn't have much to do besides wait for gamblers. Conventions were canceled, and hotel vacancies translated into hundreds of layoffs.

But this is a city where luck changes every minute. On Saturday, gamblers were returning and casinos welcomed them with slashed room rates. Weekend rooms that usually go for $189 at the Paris hotel-casino were a bargain for $100.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman encouraged residents to go the casinos to support the city's lifeblood economic industry.

Paris and Bally's casinos projected a 70 percent and 60 percent occupancy, respectively. "Actually, we have picked up," Andy Maiden, spokesman for the resorts, said. "We are quite pleased with the numbers we have received."

MGM MIRAGE, which owns seven Las Vegas properties, reported Saturday that reservation call volume had increased over the weekend. And at Caesars Palace, room rates returned to normal on Saturday with rooms going for $339.

"We will live through this," MGM MIRAGE spokesman Alan Feldman said. "A lot of people are just showing up. We're having a lot of walk-up sales."

He said the increase in room reservations is a sign the public is beginning to return to some sense of normalcy.

"We had made these plans back in March," tourist Mike Davitt of Houston said Saturday inside Caesars Palace. "We decided we weren't going to allow other people to run our lives."

That attitude, and the clinking quarters Davitt was dropping into a slot machine were good signs for Las Vegas.

"We have the full confidence that our economy will rebound. The only question is when," Feldman said.