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Thanksgiving Was Good for Vegas, But Uncertainty Back

They were full at Harrah's and the Venetian Saturday afternoon, prompting one security guard to turn away non-hotel guests trying to park in the Harrah's garage.

Vehicles at the Venetian were forced to slog through a 10-minute wait - as one left another could enter.

The garages were filled with license plates from around the country, but Californians descended upon the desert city by the tens of thousands, taking advantage of discounted room rates that were priced to fill, with rooms at the Flamingo going for as low as $70 Saturday night.

The strategy apparently helped at many of the city's largest megaresorts, but Monday brought a renewed dose of post-Sept. 11, recessionary reality.

The weekend was good, Las Vegas casino executives said, but the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas period is traditionally one of the slowest periods for the city's gaming industry, which was already hurting.

"Weekends have snapped back since Sept. 11. It's the midweeks that we're still rebuilding demand," said Mandalay Resort Group President and Chief Financial Officer Glenn Schaeffer.

Numbers crunchers at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority were gathering the holiday's numerical results Monday afternoon. But heading into the weekend they projected that 5,000 fewer people, or 265,000, would visit Las Vegas this Thanksgiving as opposed to last year's, with a citywide hotel occupancy rate of 92 percent vs. last year's 94 percent.

Operators of McCarran International Airport were expecting 90,000 travelers daily throughout the weekend as opposed to 100,000-a-day for Thanksgiving 2000. No final McCarran numbers were available Monday.

But Minneapolis-based travel consultant Terry Trippler said many of the nation's airlines carried more customers than they had expected, and the entire system avoided many of the troubles that have disrupted tens of thousands of flights since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"It was critical the airlines pulled this off," Trippler said, "because I think the fear factor had been replaced by the hassle factor."

United Airlines and Northwest Airlines flights were at 89 percent occupancy, Trippler said, while Southwest Airlines, the No. 1 carrier into McCarran, was "pleased" with its results, and American Airlines was in the "high" 80 percent range.

That was important for an industry that has eliminated more than 100,000 jobs in recent months and lost billions of dollars as the all-too-vivid images of planes slamming into the World Trade Center remain fresh in the American psyche.

"Many people were on the fence about Christmas and New Year's flights," Trippler said, noting that the relatively uneventful weekend could be a boon to air bookings.

To hear Harrah's Entertainment executive Tom Jenkin tell it, his company's Rio and Harrah's Las Vegas have been "incredibly busy" in recent weeks despite the travel woes hurting competing properties, and that trend was accentuated during the weekend.

The reason: the Las Vegas-based company has been using its 25-million-name customer database to drive business to the megaresorts.

"We have the ability to reach out to hundreds of thousands of customers," said Jenkin, who runs the two properties with nearly 5,000 rooms. "We were worried earlier in late September, early October about December, but December's shaping up to be fine."

What wasn't so fine was Sunday afternoon's estimated nine-hour commute from Las Vegas to the Los Angeles area. By midday, cars, trucks and buses were backed up to Tropicana Avenue. The typical 45-minute trip from Las Vegas to Primm took nearly three hours for one local radio station employee.

"Doesn't it just warm your heart?" asked Judy Robinson, general manager for the Barstow, Calif.-based, Highway Stations. "Our business is Las Vegas business, and I'm so thrilled."

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