businesstravelerusa.com SEPTEMBER 2019
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as Vegas is always in motion. Behind the neon
and the crowds, cranes are in gear building a
continuous line-up of new towers, new rooms,
new attractions and new entertainment com-
plexes as far as the city can dream.
Some $18 billion in new construction pro-
jects are on the table through 2020 and march-
ing toward a whopping room count just shy of
160,000 with the addition of some 14,000 hotel rooms
coming online. Most of those rooms are concentrated
within a nine-mile stretch that leads from Mandalay Bay
to Downtown Las Vegas.
Fueling much of that action is the fact that Las Vegas
is very easy and affordable to access. The destination
currently facilitates nearly 950 daily flights providing
excellent options for business travelers. In fact, McCar-
ran International Airport has reported record-breaking
passenger traffic of late. The month of May is on record as
the busiest in the airport’s history with passenger traffic
of 4,590,539.
“What has not changed is Las Vegas remains a unique
global destination where there is just a ton of things to
do, and at any hour of the day,” says Michael Goldsmith,
founder of Las Vegas-based destination business develop-
ment firm, Magellan. “Every decade or generation thinks
Las Vegas is overbuilt and this place or that place will
never be successful – but hotel occupancy continues to
climb and there is a lot of construction on the books – somuch so that Las Vegas will have the most hotel rooms
in the world in one place.” Goldsmith brings some per-
spective; before his latest venture, he was vice president
of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors
Authority (LVCVA) for 17 years.CONVENTION CENTRAL
As the meetings and conventions industry continues to
grow, topping $330 billion this year in the US alone, Las
Vegas is queuing up for ever more business, starting with
an ambitious $860 million expansion project that will
add 1.4 million square feet to the Las Vegas Convention
Center. The scheduled opening is set for January 2021,
just ahead of CES, an event that easily draws 150,000
people to the facility each of its days. A new planned
“Convention District” will offer a host of amenities to
the location, including a futuristic underground people
mover designed and backed by Elon Musk.
Las Vegas hosts more than 24,000 meetings, conven-
tions and trade shows each year, so other properties are
following suit: Caesars Entertainment Corp. is in motion
with a $375 million conference center called Caesars
Forum, scheduled to open in 2020. The 550,000-square-
foot facility stands behind the LINQ, Harrah’s and
Flamingo on the east side of the Strip, all to be connected
by convenient walkways.
Aria Resort added 200,000 square feet of LEED
certified meeting space to its convention center recently.→