Saturday, January 5, 2008

Could Vegas Lose CES?

There's a lot of grumbling as the annual Consumer Electronics Show gets started this weekend that the city's hotels and dining have become much to expensive. While this piece from Richard Velotta of In Business Las Vegas seems to indicate that nobody is ready to pull the trigger and this all may be a ploy to renegotiate room rates with major resort companies, the fact is it also represents a very serious concern.

This IS an expensive town now and CES may always stay here, but I suspect that other major conventions may start to re-evaluate as businesses are unable to spend this kind of money to send their employees. CES is sort of uniquely Vegas, but other huge shows without that history or tradition -- SuperZoo, Promotional Products Association International, World Shoe Association and Snowsports Industries of America come to mind --
could balk.
Posted by THE STRIP PODCAST at 9:49 AM
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Vegas has definitely become more expensive over the last 5 years since I started visiting. Cheap hotel rooms are less and less common, and every time I hear about one of the older places getting imploded for a new ritzy hotel, I wonder what will take it's place for good, cheap rooms.

I winder if Vegas is slowly pricing itself out of it's own market?

January 5, 2008 at 10:29 AM
Anonymous said...

I can tell you for certain that the company I work for is holding fewer management conferences in Las Vegas compared to 5 years ago for the very reason of the room rates. When you can find business class hotel room rates cheaper in San Diego, Scottsdale, and even San Francisco, that is a significant factor. No gambling in those places but that's not a big issue for business conferences. Granted, we are only talking about a few hundred people for my company but I'm sure you can multiply that by many other companies as well. Right now, with the dollar value vs. foreign currency I am sure Vegas will be fine attracting foreigners. But, that may not last forever.

January 6, 2008 at 1:45 PM
Anonymous said...

I think LV is just overrun at convention time. I am in the auto body biz, and ours is 1st week in November, along with SEMA. There's just too much to do around town. The ability to focus on anything worthwile relating to my biz is almost nonexistent. That, along with high prices and crowds everywhere make LV a poor choice for where to have a convention anymore.

January 7, 2008 at 12:48 PM

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