As far as we know, individual properties don’t keep detailed records on foreign visitors, although some traditionally have close ties with various international locations (the Rio with the Far East, for example).
The Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority does track these figures, however. It obtains its information on an annual basis from the Office of Travel and Tourism Industries at the U.S. Department of Commerce, which conducts random in-flight surveys of international travelers to the U.S., asking them, among other things, which city/cities they visited during their stay. It’s not an exact science and the LVCVA has expressed its desire for the program to be better funded and more comprehensive, but for the time being it has to make do with this annual survey as the primary source of information on foreign visitors.
The LVCVA publishes its figures for Estimated International Visitors to Las Vegas annually and generally gets its information for each year from the Dept. of Commerce in May or June of the following year, so the most up-to-date figures currently available relate to visitation in 2004. According to these figures, an estimated 1,565,000 or 13% of Las Vegas visitors in 2004 were from foreign countries. The principal ports of overseas origin are as follows:
United Kingdom – 392,000 (11.6% of the foreign market) Japan – 217,000 (6.4%) Germany – 119,000 (3.5%) France – 97,000 (2.9%) Australia – 82,000 (2.4%) South Korea – 68,000 (2%) Italy – 60,000 (1.8%) Benelux (i.e., Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg) – 57,000 (1.7%) Brazil – 36,000 (1.1%) Taiwan (R.O.C.) – 32,000 (0.9%) All other overseas – 405,000 (12%)
In addition, an estimated 1,496,000 visitors (44.3%) came from Canada, according to a Las Vegas Visitor Profile Study, and 313,000 (9.3%) from Mexico, although this figure only includes "In-Flight Survey" data and excludes those Mexican visitors who drove into the U.S.
The grand total for international visitors in 2004 was an estimated 3,374,000. Although it was 22% more than the previous year’s figure, it still doesn’t match the pre-9/11 total of more than 4 million in 2000.
