Las Vegas is hurting as tourism drops. Are Canadians behind the Sin City slump?The number of Canadians going to Vegas has plummeted — prompting concern among casino CEOs
After doing gangbuster business in the post-COVID era, Las Vegas is in the midst of a slump, with the number of tourists down sharply as Canadians in particular avoid Sin City amid bilateral bad blood over trade.
The total number of visitors is off more than 11 per cent year-over-year, according to data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, one of the most dramatic declines in recent memory outside of the pandemic.
Airline figures reveal there's been an even steeper decline among Canadians going to the desert gambling mecca.
Some U.S. travellers are also avoiding the self-described entertainment capital of the world — due, in part, to a backlash over higher fees and fewer perks for some gamblers. But resort operators say the Canadian boycott has been a notable hit to the bottom line.
On a quarterly conference call with investors last week, MGM Resorts president and CEO Bill Hornbuckle said the number of Canadian visitors started to fall earlier this year — around the time U.S. President Donald Trump launched his trade war — and there hasn't been much of a rebound.
That company owns some of the city's top properties, such as Aria, Bellagio and the Cosmopolitan and part of the NHL rink, T-Mobile Arena.
"International visitation has been an issue," Hornbuckle said. "Particularly earlier in the year, with Canada, we host a lot of hockey games, and we saw visitation down. And I think — I don't think, I know — it's still down," he said.
Thomas Reeg, the CEO of Caesars Entertainment, another major resort and gaming company that owns properties up and down the Strip, pointed to Canadians as one reason for the company's disappointing second-quarter results. "International business, particularly Canadian, is softer," he said on a call with stock analysts.
Explaining why fewer rooms were filled with guests over the last three months, Reeg said, "Canadians are a significant piece of that."
Local union leaders have even taken to calling the dip in Canadian tourists the "Trump slump."
Local politicians have good reason to be anxious about the Canadian travel boycott, said Stephen Miller, an economics professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
As the director of the university's business and economic research centre, he crunched the numbers and found Canadians contributed $3.6 billion US to the local economy last year.
Canadian spending supported some 43,000 jobs in the region, more than those employed in the manufacturing sector, Miller said.
That $3.6-billion figure comes close to the economic output of the local Nellis Air Force base — and that's saying something, given it's one of the largest and most important military installations in the U.S., with some 15,000 personnel.
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