A buoyant Las Vegas market boosted Nevada gaming revenue in October to an 11 percent increase over the same month last year.
Results compiled by the state Gaming Control Board show the state’s casinos won nearly $990 million in the month, up from almost $949 million in September and $887 million in October 2015.
Through October, state gaming win is up 2 percent over last year.
Double-digit increases in and around Las Vegas were the main ingredient. Revenue on the Strip was up 14 percent year on year. Downtown Las Vegas and North Las Vegas each reported winnings up more than 29 percent.
More of the same is likely as the year closes out, with air traffic through the city’s McCarran International Airport surpassing 4 million in October for the sixth consecutive month and international arrivals seeing steady increases.
The Clark County Department of Aviation reported more than 3.8 million passengers boarded or arrived on domestic flights at the nation’s eighth-busiest airport in October, up 3.6 percent over the same month last year, while traffic to and from other countries topped 349,000, a 10 percent jump.
In total, more than 4.27 million passengers passed through McCarran in October, a 4.2 percent increase over last year.
More than 39.8 million airline passengers traveled through Las Vegas in the first 10 months, a 5 percent increase over the same period last year. If the trend continues, 2016 could break the record of 47.8 million passengers set in the pre-recession year of 2007.
“Strong demand from both domestic and international markets continues to push passenger numbers to record levels here at McCarran,” said Rosemary Vassiliadis, Clark County director of aviation. “Direct service from numerous new markets has been added over the past several months, making it that much easier for the world to visit Las Vegas, and we expect this passenger volume to continue into 2017.”
Nearly all international carriers reported healthy increases in October. Air Canada was up 32.1 percent; Virgin Atlantic Airways was up 6.4 percent; British Airways was up 12.1 percent; Swiss carrier Edelweiss Air reported a 61.8 percent increase; and Korean Airlines was up 25.7 percent. Mexican carriers Interjet and Aeromexico reported increases of 41.7 percent and 12.8 percent, respectively.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority pegs international visitation to Las Vegas to date at 16 percent of the total. The goal is to grow that to 30 percent?with perhaps the best news of all in that respect arriving last month with the launch of the first non-stop service ever from mainland China.
Last year, with no direct flights, Las Vegas hosted more than 360,000 visitors from China, an increasingly affluent market with a high propensity to gamble and a firmly established reputation for spending big while abroad.
With the commencement by Hainan Airlines, the country’s largest carrier, of non-stop service to and from Beijing the numbers are expected to grow significantly.
“Everyone who comes to the United States, they want to come to Las Vegas,” Sonny Vinuya, president of the Las Vegas Asian American Chamber of Commerce, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Las Vegas is famous in China, not just Beijing. I’m from Shanghai, but it’s famous everywhere. It’s a very good brand name.”
Las Vegas was the fourth-most-visited city by Chinese travelers in 2015, with 14 percent of them making the trip, after San Francisco (19 percent), New York (29 percent) and Los Angeles (30 percent), according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.
But what observers see as the bigger story, if Hainan proves that enough demand exists, is that additional airlines will follow. McCarran is reported to be in discussions with several.
Speaking with the Review-Journal, Peter Phang, managing director of the convention authority’s China office, said the opportunity lies in second- and third-tier Chinese cities.
Beijing is one of 3,000 cities in China. There are at least 100 cities that have at 1 million people or more.
“Last year, China saw 120 million outbound trips,” Phang noted. “If everybody flying on that plane was a single-person trip, that’s less than 10 percent of the entire population.”
The Department of Commerce expects the number of Chinese travelers visiting the U.S. to grow 16 percent per year, with an estimated 5 million visitors from China in 2020. There were about 2.6 million Chinese travelers to the United States in 2015, and they spent over $30 billion during their stay.
