Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Q&A: Cathy Tull

LVCVA’s senior vice president of marketing

cathy tull

Tiffany Brown

Cathy Tull, senior vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, is shown in her office at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Cathy Tull has quietly become the highest-ranking female executive in the history of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Tull, who was named the LVCVA’s senior vice president of marketing in the first quarter of 2009, is a 13-year Las Vegas resident who once served as vice president of administration for MedicWest Ambulance.

Joining the LVCVA in 2005 as vice president of strategic planning, Tull now oversees a large piece of the LVCVA’s $232 million annual budget, coordinating the organization’s marketing, advertising and sales efforts.

Tull talked with In Business Las Vegas about new strategies for marketing Las Vegas, recruiting air service to the city and the outlook for convention traffic.

IBLV: The doors are open at CityCenter. Does the opening of that property change anything in how Las Vegas is presented to the world?

Tull: We think it’s an opportunity to introduce the destination again. Vegas is known for reinventing itself. We’ve done that time and time again, and CityCenter really changes the landscape of the Strip. If you’re coming up Interstate 15, it really is a magnificent structure. It really does make a difference in the landscape. Throughout history as we’ve opened new properties, occupancy has gone up. We’re looking for CityCenter to help boost that and be a part of that this year. So we’re thinking 2-5 percent for a visitation increase and that makes us excited.

MGM Mirage CEO Jim Murren thinks it’s going to mean a 7 percent boost in visitation to Las Vegas. But we’re in a different economy now. What do you think is going to happen and can Las Vegas anticipate the 7 percent boost that Murren expects?

We really do believe that we’ll have a bump in occupancy and a bump in visitation. We have looked back at history and have always seen a bump even in the recession of the late ’80s and early ’90s, which wasn’t as severe as this recession, but we did see 9,000 rooms come online and we did see an increase. So we think we’ll see that again. We’re pretty confident that’s going to happen and CityCenter is going to help make that happen. It’s something that people who come to Vegas a lot are going to want to come again and see and people who haven’t been here before, there’s some different product there and it may pull some people in. We think it will help.

But there are people who are nervous that CityCenter will cannibalize from other properties. What are your thoughts on that?

It’s interesting, at a recent board meeting, Bill McBeath (president and chief operating officer of Aria) came and gave a presentation on CityCenter and what I thought was so interesting about his comments was that when he was at Bellagio and new product opened that was very much a competitor to Bellagio, they actually saw their best year ever. That’s a good sign. There is constantly fluctuation in the product. You see that again and again every year. We think that will continue to happen with or without CityCenter. So the marketplace will adjust and we’ll move forward.

The economy has taken its toll on Las Vegas visitation. How will marketing Las Vegas change as the nation and world recover from the recession?

Las Vegas marketing has already changed. As you know, we were going down a branding path and we were doing retail messaging, but a lot of branding messaging. When the recession hit, we totally changed that. We did all retail messaging for a period of time and now we’ve reintroduced the brand and “What happens here, stays here.” But we’re also heavily focused on retail messaging. That will continue. We used to do year-out planning, so we’d do media planning a year out and now we do it every quarter. We do some upfront, national buys for the year, and the rest of it is planned on a quarterly basis so we can respond and be a little more flexible. We think that will continue. We’re also concentrating on the drive markets. Forty-six percent of our visitors fly in and the rest drive in, so we’ve made a concerted effort to target those markets where people can decide on a Tuesday that they’re going to come to Vegas on a Thursday.

What is your sales team doing to increase the volume of visitation?

They’re really out there talking to the customers. We did 1,000 sales calls domestically. We did 1,000 sales calls with our representative offices internationally, talking to customers that have business to place so we can put Las Vegas in the forefront of their thought process. We’re also running a program in the first quarter of ’10 where we’re bringing those key customers — the 100 top customers to Las Vegas — so they can see the product because, really, seeing is believing. We’re bringing those people to Las Vegas so they can see Las Vegas, they can see what we have to offer. Hopefully, we can close some of those deals. It’s different than any of the other destinations. What you’re finding is that some destinations are totally hunkering down and doing a lot by e-mail. Our philosophy, which is different than others, is to say, “We’re going to be out there,” and talking to the customers and making sure they have Las Vegas on their radar.

Will the marketing strategy change with tourists spending less? Do you still target the free spenders or will there be more emphasis on low-spending guests?

We’re going to continue to target people wanting to travel and who have an inclination to travel and convince them to come to Las Vegas with their dollars because the value proposition that we have in the destination really will make their dollars go further. While spending is down, we want to keep people interested. The occupancy rates are still 26 points higher than the national average. That’s something to be proud of. In the middle of a recession like we have today to still have occupancy in the 80s is a tremendous testament to the brand.

Lower room rates result in less revenue and less revenue means less tax revenue for the LVCVA. How much has the LVCVA advertising and marketing budget been cut and what will you be doing less of as a result?

We did cut some. But what we’ve done is shifted dollars so that we were spending more at a time when we needed to be spending more and being a little smarter and working a little bit harder to figure out what are the added-value opportunities. Traditional media buys we’re still doing and then we’re saying, “OK, what else can they give us on top of that?” About 27 percent is what we get in added value and those are really the things we’re looking for.

Give me an example of “added value.”

A buy we did with Fortune magazine is an example. We also had an opportunity to do a feature story and give them content for Las Vegas. So it’s an opportunity to engage the customer both editorially and on the advertising pages. We’re doing that with a number of online programs where we buy online (advertising) and we get mobile for free.

With budget cuts still an issue, what is LVCVA doing differently to get maximum bang for the buck?

One is the events we’re pulling in. We know it costs a certain amount to bring events in and we do sponsorships through Las Vegas Events and then the LVCVA does some as well when it has a media value behind it. We know that those are opportunities to bring visitors to Las Vegas and sometimes it’s just to get the word out about Las Vegas. So, really, a buy will be more about the media value that an event brings with it. The first weekend in December was a perfect example of new events and continuing events. The National Finals Rodeo has been here for 25 years and has been very successful. That was here at the same time as the Las Vegas Marathon, which became the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon this year and had record-breaking attendance. And, at the same time was the NASCAR Awards Banquet, which also had record-breaking attendance and which was a new event for the destination. It’s those types of targeting, where we can target our audience and get a lot of media out of it and we can also increase visitation.

Will the LVCVA focus more on markets closer to Las Vegas or will the strategy stay the same with an emphasis on focus cities in the United States and overseas?

The strategy continues to be both drive markets and international visitation. We continue to talk about Las Vegas nationally, although we have done a lot in our drive markets and in those key feeder markets which have easy flights here because we know those people can make last-minute decisions and the booking windows have come down so far that really those are people who can really make a decision one week to take a trip next week or make it at the beginning of the week to take a trip at the end of the week.

“Easy flights” meaning …

Less than a couple of hours. So people in the Midwest and the West can make that decision while if you’re in New York or in the East Coast cities, you’re going to think about it a little bit more because it takes five or six hours to get to Las Vegas. We’re also continuing to concentrate on international markets because we know to grow visitation, at the end of the day, we have to grow those international markets. Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom are our top international countries where we get visitors, so we’ll continue to concentrate resources there. We’ve scaled back a little bit in some of the other countries so we still have the brand out there and we still do some messaging. And certainly in those third-tier countries like China and India, we think those are potential growth markets down the road, but really those are opportunistic. Where can we jump in and make a splash without spending a whole lot of money and a whole lot of time?

International visitors spend more, right?

They absolutely do. They stay longer and they spend more and they plan a little further in advance. It works well for the hotels as far as knowing what their occupancies are going to be.

Everybody was pretty excited about British Airways offering daily nonstop flights to Las Vegas from Heathrow International Airport in London because of the airline’s connectivity to Europe and the Middle East. How has the service been doing so far?

The British Airways flight is a great example of bringing new international visitation. That flight is doing really well, both from the U.K. and the European Union feeder markets. We’ve continued to look for those types of opportunities to grow visitation. When we pull data trends, we look at forward-looking data and how are the booking patterns going and are there programs that we’re doing in some of those markets anyway where we can help push that message of coming to Las Vegas, particularly during slow times for the airline. We talked to British Airways, just like we do with all our airline partners, but we talked about how the flight was doing, and they were excited. They said the first half of the year looks tremendous. The booking pattern is beyond what they had thought it would be at this time. It’s the No. 1 performing new flight, so they added about six new markets when they added our flight and it’s the No. 1 performer for all of those flights. It’s a great, great partnership. The European Union feed has been good with them, which we knew because we had some pent-up capacity. Paris and Germany are really looking good, so we’re excited about that.

How does the LVCVA market to the many cities British Airways serves?

Really, we concentrate the advertising dollars in Canada, Mexico and the U.K. because those are the top three markets. The U.K. is our top overseas market. So with this, we do programs in the U.K. that are both print and online. We do sweepstakes, we do promotions. They’re retail calls to action. We’re also doing a program right now in Germany, the Frankfurt area, where we’re doing online programming for the European Union feed, so we’re concentrating on that. And then, we do a number of consumer events and PR activities in some of those other feeder cities, so it tiers down based on the number of visitors who come.

Have there been any negative repercussions to the established London carrier, Virgin Atlantic, which has daily flights from the outlying Gatwick International Airport?

The Virgin flights have been strong from Gatwick. They started out twice a week and then they added and added and added until now they’re a daily service. We work closely with them, especially on the Virgin Holidays product. We do a number of programs with them. They seem to be happy, too. We think there’s certainly room for both of those carriers. They’re so different. Virgin has an established brand with Las Vegas so they’re in a good position. BA has a great brand and now this new flight to Vegas. Coming out of Heathrow is really a different experience than the Gatwick experience and so we think there’s enough for both of them.

You commented in a recent LVCVA board meeting that you got 24 hours to enjoy the new British Airways service because US Airways announced a major cutback that trims its Las Vegas schedule nearly in half by February. Does your radar detect any other major service cutbacks by domestic carriers at McCarran International Airport?

It doesn’t. We were a little sad that it was short-lived, our excitement over the British Airways flight. We’ve been meeting with our domestic carriers, we continue to meet with them. The US Air decision was a business decision. If you look at some of the flights that they cut … they cut a Detroit flight that had a 90 percent load factor. So the flight was strong; it just didn’t fit into their new business model of hub and spoke. They were in the destination a couple of weeks ago and we talked to them about whether there would be any more cuts. While no one is promising anything, they think that they have leveled out their schedule and they’re going to move forward with what it is now. They reminded us that we are the second largest origin-and-destination location behind L.A. So we’re not in their hub-and-spoke system, but we’re the second largest destination where they fly point to point. So it puts it into perspective that we lost a lot of flights, but at the same time we’re still being serviced by them. We continue to meet with all the domestic partners to ask what we can do because they’re in a lot of our feeder markets. Allegiant, as you know, has continued to add during the recession. They’ve done really well for Las Vegas. We’ll continue to work with all of those carriers.

Anything new from Canada’s WestJet?

WestJet added and then they did some seasonal adjustments, which they always do. They’re doing really well. Sunwing is doing really well. Air Canada added a new flight. If you look at airline data, which we do every week, it’ll make you go gray very quickly because it’s constantly up and down. They’re changing the size of planes so you have different numbers of seats coming into the destination. They’re tweaking times, they’re adding a flight here, they’re taking a flight away there. So it’s constantly up and down. We look for big peaks and valleys and try to stay ahead of it with the relationship building that we’re doing with the marketing folks and the planning folks. We work with McCarran (International) Airport on airline route development. It’s really all about bringing the carrier and the message together that here, operationally, is how the airport works and all the charges and fees and everything that go along with actually flying planes and landing them. And here’s everything the destination does on the marketing and advertising side and how we can help carriers feel good that we can help them fill their plane. While they need all the technical information, they also need to feel good about adding a route. So that’s worked well for us.

Does the LVCVA continue to recruit domestic and foreign air carriers to Las Vegas with McCarran? Walk me through how one of those presentations goes.

There are a lot of different things that happen in route development. As you know, it’s a very long process. People think that airlines like British Airways just decide one day that they’re going to fly to Vegas and that’s absolutely not the way it works. It takes years of relationship-building. What we do on the marketing side, the LVCVA is constantly seeing airline route marketing folks. We see them a lot at industry events when we’re in-country, internationally or in the hometown of one of the airlines where they’re hubbed, we will talk to the marketing folks about how the marketing programs are going. We also have a lot of programs with their vacation arms, like Southwest Vacations and all those people we do programming with on a co-op basis where we do co-op advertising with them. We’re also in touch with their planners. That’s a lot with McCarran. McCarran has someone who watches and analyzes all the data, what flights are working well, what flights may be struggling, where there’s potential for growth. We’ll work with them on putting an analysis together to say, “Here’s where there’s A) seat capacity that we can help fill, so we should try to push people to take these flights from these cities because there’s capacity there that they can certainly book or B) what looks like it may need another route or where is there a new route that we want to target.” Then, we’ll work both with McCarran to reach out to both the planners — the route planning people at the airlines and the marketing folks — to say, “Vegas is a good option for you because A) you can fill the plane on the marketing side and B) it’s going to work for you financially on the route planning side.” And that’s how it all comes together. Then we do a couple of route planning conferences a year. The planners talk to destinations all over the world. They’re short, brief meetings where you bring all of your data, all the information about the destination and then, we’ll follow up with them separately. We do that with McCarran a couple times a year.

I know you can’t talk a lot of specifics about route development, but what’s the overall outlook?

The outlook is great. We already had an announcement from XL Airlines out of Paris that they’re going to start a charter service from May to September, twice a week. That will help further prove that French market. So we’re excited about that. That just happened this fall. And, we’re talking about a number of other carriers that are interested in starting service, maybe on a charter basis or starting a couple days a week. If you look at the history of what’s happened with airline service in Las Vegas, before scheduled service, the charters have come in and really proven markets and then scheduled carriers will take over those routes. So the charters will go away. Now, you’re seeing another resurgence of the charters coming in, proving the market once again and then it may or may not be handed off to a schedule carrier. It’s pretty cyclical. We think we’re on the upswing now of some new service being added in destinations. A lot of the airlines are looking at new models, new routes, where they can shift planes that they currently have or planes that they’ve had on order. They’ve ordered these planes a couple of years ago, they’re taking delivery, they’re looking at places to put them. We’re front and center with new product to say Vegas is a great place to be.

Finish this sentence: Las Vegas really needs a nonstop flight from …

… Italy. Spain. We could use flights from there. We could use flights from Australia.

One of the biggest challenges Las Vegas and other major convention cities faces is the downturn in business travel. Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly recently said business travel hasn’t returned for the airline and he sees nothing to indicate that it will anytime soon. What’s your take? What is the LVCVA doing to bring back the conventioneer?

We’re feeling good about business travel. While we certainly aren’t out of the woods and we have a long way to go, a number of our airline partners have indicated that they have started to see incremental increases in business traffic. Southwest has a different business model. Las Vegas is 85 percent leisure visitors and Southwest is our largest carrier so they do a terrific job servicing Las Vegas. But a number of other airlines who have different business models have indicated they have seen a little bit of loosening and so we’re continuing to work with them to move that ball forward. The LVCVA, public policy-wise, has worked with the U.S. Travel (Association) to be sure Las Vegas isn’t on a black list somewhere that says you can’t bring meetings, conventions and trade shows to Las Vegas so we’ve been working with our congressional delegation on that front to make sure we don’t have that challenge. On the advertising front, we’ve started a whole new business campaign this past year that we’re really targeting the decision-makers. So a meeting planner who we’ve continued to work with and who we’ve always worked with will bring several destinations to a C-suite type person — a COO or a CEO, whoever is making the decision for the organization — and saying you could go to Destination A and here’s what it all means and the costs entailed and you could go to Destination B and here’s what all that means. So we’re really working to target those people who are making the decision to say Las Vegas is a great value proposition, the ease of access with the airport being right here and you can be at your hotel and you’re not wasting time driving.

So you’re saying business travel is picking up, but Gary Kelly says it isn’t. Is there some disconnect here?

I don’t think so. I think Southwest, being our largest carrier, the majority of our visitors are leisure visitors. So it makes sense that, for us, we’re not seeing that with Southwest because for us, the majority of our customers are leisure visitors

The expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center has been put on hold. What’s the status of the project and what do you tell customers who inquire about it? How does the delay affect your ability to market to the conventioneer?

What we did was we put the master plan enhancement program (MPEP) on hold last year because of the economy, and it didn’t make sense for us to try to move forward with that project at that time. We’re re-evaluating it. We’re getting ready now for budgeting for Fiscal Year ’11 and we’re making a plan for when we think we might be able to start the MPEP again and then we’ll communicate that to the customers. So they’re aware that it currently is on hold and they’re also aware that we’re going to get back with them early this year and talk about how long we really think it is. So we’re in the midst right now of putting together a strategic plan on how long do we think that hold period is going to be, based on where we are today with the recession, and what do we need to do in between. So there are some things that we are going to have to do that at the time were in the master plan program, but because the program is on hold, you still have to do certain things to keep the building up and service the customers. So what we’re doing currently are: What are those projects that we need to make sure we are funding in the budget so we can get those things done? We finished a couple in Phase 1: the bathrooms in the Central Hall that were added. That was something we needed to do anyway and we were in the midst of it when we suspended the project. So we went ahead and completed that and we’ll be looking at what other projects need to happen before we can start up again.

So it’s happening at a slower pace?

Absolutely. And seeing if there are some things in the master plan that we can pull out of the master plan and do as a one-shot that won’t be affected. One of the things that (LVCVA President) Rossi (Ralenkotter) has always said is that he doesn’t want to do something and then have it torn down when we do the master plan. So they will only be projects we know are part of the bigger picture and will complement the bigger picture and won’t have to be taken down when we move forward.

Most analysts view 2010 as a turnaround year for tourism. What good things are on the horizon for the Las Vegas destination this year?

We’re excited about the year. It started with the New Year’s Eve fireworks off the hotel rooftops again, a good way to ring in the new year. We had CES come to town. That’s always a great convention for Las Vegas. We worked with them with a convention attendance program to make sure they had a good number of people at the trade show. On the trade show side, one of the things the trade-show producers are telling us is that they’re having buyers attend the show. There may not be as many people because there aren’t as many people just looking, but they’re certainly getting the quality of the folks that they want. We’ll continue to move forward with that program this year. And then we have some great special events coming. We have the Rugby Sevens, which is new for us and has an international flavor coming in February. It’s Chinese New Year Feb. 14. We’re also going to be doing the Sports Illustrated consumer party again for their swimsuit edition, which was very popular last year. XL will start their new service in May. So 2010 looks to be a good year.

There’s also the possibility that things will stay stagnant in 2010. What are some of the danger signs for the year and how will you address them?

We’ll continue to monitor consumer confidence, something we always monitor. Economists say it needs to stay at around 90 percent for people to really feel good about the economy and where they’re at. So we’ll continue to monitor consumer confidence and drive traffic. Drive traffic has continued to increase and we’ll continue to monitor that knowing that if we see a decrease then there’s things we need to do in the drive markets. We’ll continue to base all of our programming off research and we’ll continue to talk to our customers. In 2009, it was all about the excuse. Customers needed an excuse or a reason why they would come to Las Vegas. A concert could be an excuse. Any type of event happening in Las Vegas was an excuse for them. That was our whole “excuses” campaign. But watching consumer sentiment, how they’re feeling and what they need, and decide whether we’ll continue down the “excuses” road or whether we need to change the campaign, based on what’s happening.

What about the additional room capacity. Is that a concern?

It’s really all about how we can drive increased visitation. What we need to do at the LVCVA is continue to increase the number of people who travel to Las Vegas and we can do that in a number of ways. We can do that through our advertising programs, we can do that by pushing out the special offers that the hotels — the packages — that they are putting together. We can also do that with events, so that is something that we’ll continue to push and look at. Are there new events that we can bring to the destination that have been in other places previously that have proven successful that could be successful for Las Vegas? And then making sure the events we have in the destination are successful, so those events that come here all the time continue to be successful, similar to the National Finals Rodeo. They’ve been here for 25 years. We’ll make sure we’re partnering with all those groups.

Is it a concern that after CityCenter, there really isn’t much new product in the development pipeline?

No. We know that when you look at building booms, they’ve come in waves. So we open a large number of rooms at any one time. We think we’re on the end of that wave right now. But then if you look at what’s going on in the destination — Tropicana is doing a remodel, for example — there are things that are going to continue to go on where people are refreshing product or changing product up. It may not be a whole new building, but certainly there’s a number of hotel properties that are doing things individually. So there are a number of those properties that are here today that will continue to change to bring people back.

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