As I've mentioned on this blog, I've soured on Las Vegas, a place I used to visit so often that I briefly toyed with the idea of buying a small condo in that city and living, back-and-forth, there along with my native Los Angeles. The reason for the recent souring is a trend that started before COVID shut the town down for a while, then got worse when it reopened and tourists stampeded back, willing to pay just about anything.
It's operated on the following basis ever since: Raise the price of rooms and make them pay an exorbitant Resort Fee for each night they're there, raise the price of shows, raise the price of meals and every item in the gift shop, cut back on comps and coupons, charge people for what previously was free parking, make the games harder to win and not pay off as much when you do, etc. There is a belief that if you up the price of your buffet from $30 to $40, you will have just as many patrons and that will hold true when you later raise the fee to $50 and then to $60.
So how's it working out? Well, here's an article that starts like this…
Visitation to Las Vegas fell for the fifth consecutive month in May with occupancy rates, room rates and passenger traffic at Harry Reid International Airport all below levels in May from a year ago.
Does that mean that the public is beginning to feel too exploited; that the hotels and other businesses have gone too far? It would be nice to think that but I'd have to see more evidence. Knowing the town as I do, I think that before they'd lower prices significantly and with some sense of permanence, they'd keep the prices right where they are and start spreading around more coupons and discounts. Vegas is the kind of place where…
Well, let's say two restaurants are equally convenient and pretty much the same in terms of decor and service. One is offering a breakfast special for ten bucks. The other is offering the exact same platter for twenty dollars but they disperse a lot of coupons for five dollars off. A lot of Vegas Visitors would opt for the latter because it comes with that good feeling of getting a bargain.
It's not unlike the outta-towner who'll lose $200 at the first casino he hits, $400 at the second casino, $300 at the third one…and then at the fourth one, he quits when he's fifty bucks ahead. Then he loses a few grand more at other casinos and when he gets back home and friends ask "How'd you do?" he proudly answers that he beat Casino #4 for fifty bucks…or more likely, a much larger number.
And there's another reason it's unlikely they'll lower prices. Dolly Parton recently announced she'll play a six-show "mini-residency" at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace this December. ("Residency" is a new term that implies some sort of mega-event. No one ever plays a Vegas performance venue "over the weekend" these days. It's a "four-show mini-residency.")
The cheapest seats for Dolly were around $1,381. That's for one seat way in the back from which she's the size of an Altoid. Up front near the stage, tix were around $19,777 each. Online ticket sales opened the other day and every seat for every performance was snatched up in less than 90 minutes. In the Secondary Market — Stubhub, TickPick, Vivid Seats, those kinda websites — those tickets are now being offered for triple those amounts and up…and up and up and up. God knows what they'll be when December approacheth.
If you were the guy or gal at a casino in charge of raising or lowering prices, you might lower them when it looked like you'd have a lot of empty rooms. Empty rooms don't lose money at the Roulette table or dine in your restaurants. But you're going to take note of how much readily-disposable income the folks coming to see Ms. Parton have and assume they're not going to hesitate to pay the highest number you can think of when they dine at your steakhouse. Especially if the steak has the word "Wagyu" in its description.