Led by CES, which is bringing more than 130,000 visitors to Las Vegas this week, midweek conventions make Strip resorts look as opulent as they do, according to the CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA).
To launch the 2024 meeting season, which could surpass the record 6.6 million convention goers in 2019, Steve Hill welcomed a media contingent Monday to the remodeled South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. The $600 million renovation that the LVCVA started in 2023 and will continue through 2025 mirrors the design and architecture of the new West Hall.
Once known as the Consumer Electronics Show, CES is a Super Bowl of conventions, with one-third of the 130,000 visitors traveling internationally from 150 different countries and territories. There will be 3,500 exhibitors at the event, which generates worldwide media attention.
Las Vegas now has 15 million square feet of meeting and convention space, more than any other U.S. destination, and CES is hosted at the Las Vegas Convention Center and several venues on the Strip. Las Vegas hosted 5.79 million convention attendees between January and November 2023 and could surpass six million when the final tally is completed. That’s 21% higher than the 4.77 hosted through November 2022, according to the LVCVA, and convention attendance could set an all-time record in 2024 based on comments from resort executives on future group bookings. The record of 6.64 million was set in 2019 prior to the pandemic.
Convention business drives Sunday-through-Thursday visitation to help fill more than 156,000 hotel rooms, including the 3,700 at Fontainebleau, which opened last month adjacent to the Convention Center.
Business travelers spend more and often attach a leisure trip before or after conventions. In 2022, average convention visitor spending was one-third higher than spending by the average leisure visitor, according to data compiled by the LVCVA Research Center.
“Las Vegas wouldn’t look like it does if we hadn’t been so successful in filling rooms midweek,” Hill said. “In order for those properties to make financial sense, you have to fill those rooms all the time and not just on the weekends. Our business customers have been so important for us during the week, just to allow Las Vegas to be what it is.”
Conventions also expand the Las Vegas brand by bringing those business customers to the city, then get them to return because of what they experienced, Hill said. “They can come back as leisure travelers too. Maybe they come as business customers for a show or meeting, then I want to come back with their families to show them too.”
For 2023, the Las Vegas Convention Center has 51 trade shows on the books, with an estimated attendance of 1.3 million. In 2022, the LVCC hosted 48 trade shows with about 1.2 million attendees, an increase from 2021 when the facility welcomed 850,000 attendees.
“Attendance will probably level off in 2024 and 2025,” Hill said. “We’ll go from having 2.5 million square feet that we haven’t really grown into (with the West Hall addition) and we’ll cut back to 1.9 or 2.1 million square feet, depending on what’s taken out of service for the construction.”
Las Vegas’s largest trade shows are still in rotation, including CES, along with the World of Concrete in January, National Association of Broadcasters in April, and SEMA aftermarket auto show in November. In 2023, SEMA hosted 160,000 attendees from 140 countries.
For the first time, the NAACP will host its national convention in Las Vegas in July. In 2023, the group’s convention in Boston attracted nearly 10,000 attendees.
It all makes the continued Convention Center improvements vital, Hill said. Planned renovations of aging facilities were delayed by the Great Recession in the late 2000s and by the pandemic in 2020.
“It matters to the shows and the destination as well. Show attendance increases by 9% to 10%. We think that can go up with a better experience (in the Convention Center), with the feel and accommodations of the buildings themselves. They need to work and be beautiful and match what we expect in all of Las Vegas and that’s what we’ll have in two years.”
There’s continued focus on the meeting business in Las Vegas beyond the Convention Center. A three-year $188 million renovation of the Venetian Expo Center will begin in 2024 and the Mandalay Bay Convention Center’s $100 million renovation is expected to continue through the end of the year.
The Las Vegas Convention Center was named the number-one convention center in the U.S. by the Wall Street Journal, with the Venetian Expo and Mandalay Bay Convention Center ranking third and seventh respectively, Hill said.
Conventions are also changing how they operate to bring in more visitors.
SEMAFest debuted as a new consumer-facing component of the SEMA automotive convention and attracted 16,000 attendees for car-culture exhibits and live performances. The sold-out Bravocon fan fest was held for the first time in November, attracting legions of fans and significant social-media exposure.
“One of the things Las Vegas has learned and our customers have learned is that there are opportunities to expand the experience around an event,” Hill said. “You can make an event a citywide event by adding a concert, an experience, or viewing party or display after a show or meeting. The ability to grow the event grows fans for the event itself, but also grows fans for Las Vegas. The best example of that is around the National Finals Rodeo. Over 10 days, 180,000 people attend, but probably 500,000 people are in town over the course of those 10 days for the experience at the South Point, or the Convention Center for Cowboy Christmas, or properties for viewing parties. They just want to around it and some of the experiences are enough to draw visitors in and of themselves.”
