Living in Las Vegas these days is kind of like living in that big glass bubble in Arizona. You know the one called “Biosphere”. Here in the middle of nowhere sits a dynamic, faux architecture ‘Oasis of Wonder’ supported by a life form called the tourist. Similar to our need for oxygen, we have a great need for tourists and, more importantly, tourist dollars.
We cannot let anything upset the fragile balance of tourism or we domino into economic chaos. No tourists, no tourist dollars, no tax revenue, no support jobs in the hospitality industry, and it goes down the line from there. And all of it impacts real estate values in the process.
Well, our president, several months back, made an off hand comment about government agencies holding meetings in Las Vegas. He said it was high living and wasteful to hold those meetings here. A simple enough and very naive statement, but, within the following week 341 conventions of all kinds of companies, agencies and associations pulled the plug on plans to visit and spend in fabulous Las Vegas. Realistically that equates loosely to about 800,000 tourist/conventioneers lost. It also makes a greater loss of an estimated $1.6 billion dollars to Las Vegas as a community and seriously effected local service industry jobs.
Lobbing a Bomb at Las Vegas Tourism
Now fast forward to today,Feb 2, 2010 (oddly enough Groundhog Day) in New Hampshire and “there he goes again ” when the President told the assembled crowd and a gaggle of reporters that the economy is starting a little rebound “but that does not mean take your money and go to Vegas”. Nevada’s Governor Gibbons, Speaker Harry Reid and Las Vegas Mayor Goodman went immediately on the defensive. They almost lost it completely as they commented on the words our Leader of the Free World spoke that day. He is, in fact, a world leader. Like him or not, his words do carry great weight, especially with the traveling public.
Super Bowl weekend is usually a sellout period for Vegas hotels and now we all have gasped and hold hope that there is no drop in revelers or tourists in the next five days. Are we just too paranoid about possible adverse effects on our little tourist town in the desert or is the American public really that jittery about the economy? Could an innocent, simple, misspoken turn of phrase in a speech somewhere in New England sucker-punch us while we are down? An estimated 2,000,000 southern Nevadans certainly hope not.
