Can Vegas recover?

Agreed. Too bad that joke of a high-speed rail will never do it. Victorville? Seriously?

Quote: ruascott

Agreed. Too bad that joke of a high-speed rail will never do it. Victorville? Seriously?

Metrolink should extend the Inland Empire-Orange County line & the San Berardino line to Victorville.

Quote: pacomartin

then the whole region will be seen as a single destination to foreign travelers.

Why would anyone want a foreign traveler?

3x4x5x Odds is just about 5x. About fifty percent of the town is at this level. Any dice dealer in town knows that people who come up to the table complaining about 5x being an insufficient odds offering is likely to be a player who rarely takes odds at all and when he does take odds usually does it at about the 2x level.

Train service? I bet even the people who live in Victorville will find train service slow and the parking inconvenient.

The train won't matter one iota even if it IS built, because it won't be a sufficiently attractive alternative to driving. When you get off the hypothetical train, you're in downtown Vegas--now what? You'll need to rent a car. Not to mention that to get to the train terminal back in L.A., you had to use public transportation (ecch), or pay for parking. And the odds are against that departure station being anywhere near you. Plus, the fare will have to be exorbitant to pay for the astronomical cost of building the damn thing in the first place. Also, it would only serve a SINGLE market--Southern California. Even a 50% increase in Southern CA visitation--something I seriously doubt that the train would ever have the capacity to accomplish--would only be about a 5% increase in total visitor count. Not worth the money, except, of course, if it's somebody else's (the taxpayers'!) money

The high speed rail link from London to Paris makes it an open-jaw airline ticket increasingly attractive. You fly into either London or Paris and return from the other city. After sightseeing in one city you take the train to the other city in as fast as 2.25 hours.

A good train link could make it possible to have an open jaw link between Vegas and Los Angeles (possibly through Ontario airport instead of LAX).

British and French visitors are increasingly important to Las Vegas. In particular British are coming in record numbers.

Deleted

IMHO, another big factor is going to be Airfare pricing, which is way
up since last year. Couple that WITH nearly every other state adding
casino gambling, and I think that LV may have reached its peak.

The silver lining is probably that this will lead to more competition in
LV, so more hotel promo's.

Quote: JohnnyQ

IMHO, another big factor is going to be Airfare pricing, which is way
up since last year. Couple that WITH nearly every other state adding
casino gambling, and I think that LV may have reached its peak.

The silver lining is probably that this will lead to more competition in
LV, so more hotel promo's.

I put this question to a poll a few months. The question was On October 2007 Nevada reported a peak running 12 month total of $13 billion. For 30 monthly reports since that time the total has been lower so that it now stands at $10.4 billion. Only one person out of 16 said that Nevada had peaked, but the majority thought that it would take over three years to reacquire the level in October 2007.

Recovery is what Las Vegas does best. I agree that it will take some time, and that it MAY have peaked (not taking a stance on that just yet), but Las Vegas is not going to become a ghost town at all. The allure of Vegas is still there, and even though the games really suck out there and the comps are stingy, there are very few places where all your casinos are within walking distance (Tunica has a few possibly Atlantic City).

There will be some more scaling back, no doubt. Some casinos may close and the strip may physically shrink for the first time. But Las Vegas will emerge as a destination and will be fine in the long run.

Quote: Tiltpoul

Some casinos may close and the strip may physically shrink for the first time. But Las Vegas will emerge as a destination and will be fine in the long run.

The ability of the Riviera to keep open seems to indicate that physically shutting down many casinos is very unlikely.

Reno has been struggling with competition for much longer than the strip, but they managed to peak around June 2006 (as opposed to October 2007).

I think the question is not will Vegas vanish, but will it ever grow again.