This was the 25th consecutive year that I've gone out to Las Vegas for the annual Consumer Electronics Show held primarily in and around the Las Vegas Convention Center. The show has changed - and not changed - over the years. Attendance at the show has wavered in the past 10 years. At one point, there were as many as 150,000 attendees, but more recently we've seen announced attendance of 120,000 which many people said was inflated by show officials. This year, attendance was noticeably up - as much as 12 to 15 percent - and there were over 200 new vendors showing their goods at the show.
The one thing that hasn't changed over the years is the expansive growth that goes on in Las Vegas. Every year, it seems like a new hotel or development springs up from nowhere. And this year was no exception as the long anticipated CityCenter fully opened its hotel, retail and gaming operations. The $8.5 billion dollar development faced problems right from the start as soaring costs, work stoppages, lawsuits and even deaths caused the original planned opening date in 2008 to be pushed back to "officially" December of 2009 with the opening of three of the hotels - the Aria, Mandarin Oriental and Vdara - adding an additional 5900 rooms to the already bloated number of hotel rooms available in Vegas. However, parts of the CityCenter including The Crystals retail shopping area, didn't fully open until 2010. The Veer Towers, designed by the famed architect Helmut Jahn, opened in 2010, as well.
But one part of the CityCenter - the Harmon Hotel - has seen numerous delays and set backs, primarily from structural defects that were detected nearly three years ago. CityCenter officials announced in November of 2010 that they would like to demolish the 27 story hotel (it was initially designed to top out at 47 stories) and start over. However, lawsuits between principal owner MGM Resorts and their financial partner Dubai World, as well as numerous leins that were brought against the property beginning in 2009 has put the planned demolition on hold for at least 18 months. It will be a while to see if CityCenter (below left) becomes a profitable entity or if it becomes the poster child for corporate excess that became a world-wide plague just before the recession hit in 2008.
Another new hotel/entertainment complex that recently opened in Las Vegas is the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas (above right). Originally, it was going to be called just the Cosmopolitan, but the Hearst Corporation filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against the then owners of the property. Hearst Corp owns Cosmopolitan magazine and didn't want their magazine associated with a property in Las Vegas. The suit was settled out of court in March of 2010 and the resort was officially renamed Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. But while I was there, it was already being referred to as "The Cosmo".
The Cosmopolitan was not without its own set of problems. The original owners defaulted on a number of loans and the German Deutsch Banke AG took over sole ownership of the property in 2008. Originally, the plans called for 2200 rooms that would be condos with 800 hotel rooms. However, 400 condo owners who had paid down payments on condos in the Cosmopolitan sued the developers in 2009 claiming that the June 2010 opening would be unrealistic and that they feared that many of the condos would eventually be turned into hotel rooms lessening the value of their properties. The developers eventually refunded deposits to the owners and they eventually turned all 3000 rooms into suites.
The Cosmopolitan entertainment complex includes a shopping mall, a number of restaurants and nightclubs and a 100,000 sq. ft. casino. I was able to walk around the place one evening when we visited the Las Vegas branch of the great Montreal-based Mediterranean seafood restaurant, Estiatorios Milos. I found the shopping area to be somewhat schlocky and garish. But then, again, much of Las Vegas is schlocky and garish.
Las Vegas, as a whole, has been suffering during the recession. Gambling revenues are down over 15% from 2007 and visitors to Las Vegas is down about the same. Still, with all the new hotel rooms that have sprung up over the past 18 months, there are now over 77,000 hotel rooms on the famed Las Vegas Strip and an estimated 135,000 hotel rooms in Las Vegas proper. I read somewhere while I was in Vegas that occupancy rates hover around 70%, but that's a figure that I find hard to believe given the economy and the number of new hotel rooms that have opened over the past year. What this is doing is creating tremendous pressure on hotels throughout Vegas - especially up and down the Strip - to vie for the tourism dollars. It will be a challenge for many of the casino/hotels to maintain occupancy rates at current room prices. Look for some pretty good room deals in Las Vegas in the coming months.
Las Vegas is still not without its own problems. Unemployment in the area hit 15% this past fall with construction and service jobs affected the most. Foreclosures in Las Vegas County remain the highest in the nation. A number of developers have built high-rise condos in Las Vegas and many of the properties sit empty today. It's not quite the utopia paradise that the city portrays in its ads.
I've always said that everyone should be sentenced to go to Las Vegas for at least three days once in their life. If you can get past the glitz and glamour, the trashiness and downtrodden, the excess and misery, Las Vegas is a wondrous oasis that offers people an escape from reality. But with that, it also attracts the lowest element of mankind and it seems that they multiply right before your very eyes. I still think Las Vegas - with nearby attractions such as Hoover Dam, Death Valley and the Grand Canyon - remains a viable vacation destination. And the potential to find good rooms at low prices rises each time another hotel goes up along the Strip. But I can think of a number of places I'd rather go on vacation other than Las Vegas.
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