Vegas Visitor Stats August 2020
Each month the Las Vegas Convention & Visitor’s Authority releases visitor stats for Las Vegas. We covered these numbers in June and July and I was really interested to see the trends that August would bring. We now have the August numbers and there are a few surprises, but overall it probably isn’t very good.
Las Vegas Visitors Down 57%
To start 1,537,400 people visited Las Vegas in August, 2020. That sounds like a lot but it is down more than 2 million people from the 3,579,000 who visited in August, 2019. Ouch! That is a 57% year over year decline, but an increase from June and July where the declines were 70% and 61% respectively.
Where the Strip casinos are getting nailed is revenue per available room. Not all of the Vegas Strip hotel rooms were online in August, however each room that was available only generated $45.81 vs. $117.67 a year ago. That amounts to a 61.1% decline on the Strip compared to a 60.1% decline for Clark County as a whole.
Occupancy Is A Mixed Bag
Those declines are being driven by decreased occupancy. Weekend occupancy was a bright spot increasing from 54.4% to 63.1% from July, 2020 to August, 2020 but it is a far cry from the 95.2% in August, 2019. Midweek occupancy was among the worst spots overall. Only 34.4% of hotel rooms are occupied during the week. A sure sign that things won’t recover until conventions come back!
Check out the video for my full analysis of the numbers, but there is one thing I want to point out. Gaming revenue as a whole for Clark County is only down about 25% which is much better compared to some other categories. I believe this is largely driven by an increase in locals at casinos which is backed up by the fact that Boulder Highway casinos actually saw a year over year INCREASE in revenue. They did better in 2020 compared to 2019. Wow!
Vegas Visitor Stats August 2020 – Bottom Line
I highly suggest checking out the stats for yourself and checking out my full video analysis of what I think these numbers mean and why despite some hope I think the recovery will be long and slow. In the video I also discuss the deplaned passengers and highway traffic numbers and other markets like Laughlin and Mesquite. There are some interesting surprises.
What do you think about these rough Vegas visitor numbers? Is there enough good news to give you hope or is the bad news too much to take?
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Vegas is dead until they dump resort fees and open shows and bars.
The resort fee has all sorts of benefits for the companies. Probably more likely to go up than to be gone.
This is a disaster. Time for a shutdown?
Earlier this year, the surprise resort fees (MGM) at 2x the nightly room rate killed it for me. I’m going to be doing lots of discretionary travel in the next 6 months and the folks at MGM did a world class job of putting themselves at the bottom of my list. Regarding the title of your article, there is no “good news for me in Vegas”. EVERY F#*&$^# TIME … it’s the land of bait and switch and that title is well deserved. Really looking forward to my tour of New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah….places where I can be in that general vicinity, but I’ll be with folks who know customer service and appreciate my spend.
What’s super awesome is that I have no conventions pulling me into Vegas for the foreseeable future, so I’m going 12+ months with not setting foot there, which, in and of itself, is very special. I wake up in the morning appreciating the fact that Vegas is not on my business calendar.