Las Vegas’ major hotels report sellouts for New Year’s

David Strow

Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2002 | 10:51 a.m.

Despite a national economic slowdown and terrorism fears, Las Vegas was a full house this weekend.

Major hotels reported sellouts, visitor counts were expected to be almost unchanged from last year's levels, and travelers leaving Las Vegas packed McCarran International Airport this morning.

"It was busy, and today it is really busy," airport spokeswoman Debbie Millett said. "They're moving smoothly, but a lot of people are flying in and out today. Today lives up to expectations."

But it was a different kind of customer coming to Las Vegas for New Year's 2002.

In years past customers would have to book hotel rooms months in advance to have any hope of staying in Las Vegas on New Year's Eve. If they did manage to get a room, the rates they would pay for those rooms would be exorbitant.

This year much of the New Year's business was booked less than a week before Dec. 31, said John Marz, senior vice president of marketing at Mandalay Resort Group, which owns five Strip casinos.

"People understand there's a lot of (vacancies) in Las Vegas now, and they can wait longer to make their decision to come up here," Marz said. "That's exactly what happened (this New Year's). It was literally within the last five days that these rooms started to sell out."

The story was the same at MGM MIRAGE's five Strip casinos, spokeswoman Shelley Mansholt said.

"Most of our properties did sell out, but what we saw was that a lot of properties did not sell out until the last minute," Mansholt said. "In previous years they sold out many weeks in advance."

But sell out Las Vegas did, or at least it came very close.

"We had a good weekend ... the last two days of the (holiday) weekend, we were full," Marz said.

In terms of number of visitors, the holiday beat expectations, Marz said. At Park Place Entertainment Corp.'s five Strip properties, business was strong enough that hundreds of laid-off workers were called back, Park Place spokeswoman Debbie Munch said.

"It was more an FIT (free-and-independent travel) customer than a casino customer," Marz said. "Our revenues for the weekend met our expectations. We got a good rate this weekend. It was not an incredibly great rate, but it was a good rate."

Mansholt said the weekend was not the revenue generator for MGM MIRAGE that it had been in prior years.

"In terms of rates, they were much lower than in recent years," Mansholt said.

Though final counts won't be known for several weeks, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority was projecting 282,000 would visit Las Vegas for New Year's 2002, down by just 5,000 over New Year's 2001. That would equate into a 97 percent occupancy rate, compared with more than 99 percent on New Year's 2001.

"Certainly they (resort operators) seemed to be filling (hotel rooms) gradually," LVCVA researcher Kevin Bagger said. "As far as the revenue side, that was difficult for us to quantify. They were guarded about that, because they weren't achieving the rates they saw last year."

Rates for the Strip's hotel rooms did not challenge last year's levels.

When brokerage firm Merrill Lynch conducted a survey of 14 major Strip properties Dec. 20, not one was quoting a higher rate for this weekend over last year. The lowest decline in rates for the Saturday preceding New Year's was posted at Mandalay Bay, where rates were off just 2.6 percent. At the Flamingo Las Vegas, the decline was more than 72 percent. The average decline among the 14 properties was just over 40 percent.

But compared with the last four weeks, rates were up everywhere in the Merrill Lynch survey. The $369 rate quoted by Mandalay Bay was nearly double that property's $192 average weekend rate for the last four weeks. At the Bellagio, rates rose from a $299 average to $499 on Dec. 29; at Paris Las Vegas, rates rose from $163 to $260; and the Venetian reported a rise from $249 to $299.

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