DeNile is the only river that runs through the Las Vegas Strip and casino bosses having been boating on it big-time of late. But when it comes to blowing sunshine up one’s own ass, there’s nobody better at it than Pollyanna-in-Chief Steve Hill, CEO of the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority. He dumped an extra-large serving of bullshit on the plate of CDC Gaming‘s Buck Wargo last week and demanded that the public swallow it whole.
In keeping with Big Gaming’s Things Are Better Than They Ever Have Been narrative, Hill promised that good times are just around the third-quarter corner and into 2026, economic indicators be damned. In HillWorld, painful reality is for sissies. Real men make it up as they go along. Three quarters of declines on the Strip? “A normal lull,” sayeth Hill. Flat international visitation? A positive sign, he claims. Hotel occupancy down 13% through June? He’ll look into it.
Of course, Hill isn’t going to look in the obvious place: overpricing. He claims that to be a false narrative, unperturbed by all those casino companies peskily touting their high ADRs (we’re especially looking at you, Wynn Resorts). “You can go to lots of places in town right now and get a room for a price that you would never be able to pay in another city.” Only if Big Gaming has been suddenly dropping its rates in response to empty rooms. (A personal note: We were just in Raleigh for 50,000-soul Galaxy Con and got better room rates than we could enjoy for a comparable period in Sin City. Just sayin’.)
Of the current occupancy crisis, Hill straightfacedly claims, “That’s a positive thing and Vegas will be better for it. You’ll see a property adjust.” He then whines about anecdotal (as if that made it somehow untrue) instances of price-gouging in Vegas. “People keep bringing up to me this $26 bottle of water. I bet a bunch of money if you go over to wherever that was and buy that water today, they changed the price.” Yeah, they probably raised it. We’ll take that wager, pal. It’s not just the $26 water, Steve. It’s the $25 room-service upcharge at MGM Grand, the $50 penalty for unplugging the Paris-Las Vegas minibar, the parking fees, the $55-per-night resort fees, the naked greed manifest in every earnings call. The ‘anecdotal’ evidence is there in black and white, Mr. LVCVA, and it’s got you buried so deep you can’t see straight. Maybe you need a comped subscription to LVA, to get back in touch with the real world.
“We’re still a value,” Hill insists. “We’re working hard to push that message.” Maybe he should be pushing his corporate masters to push that reality instead. “Vegas is a very competitive place. We all work together to get people here and once they’re here, everybody is competing for that business.” Then why does it seem like the industry is overtly colluding to fix prices and practices? It’s very monkey-see/monkey-do in Vegas and the monkeys have an uncanny knack for always ratcheting prices higher in concert, not lower.
To his credit, Hill The Shill, acknowledges that “Our budget-conscious visitor is more concerned now than they have been in a while.” Hmmm. Ya think it might have something to do with prices in Vegas? He also obliquely acknowledges the economic problems we’re facing. “The uncertainty around tariff policy, the job market and their financial situation are causing them to either hesitate, delay travel or decide that they just can’t do it right now.” Which is why regional casinos are prospering (something about which Hill has also been in denial) at a time when Vegas is not. When Las Vegas becomes unaffordable, the ubiquity of gambling in other states starts to become a genuine threat.
Hill certainly fails to connect the dots between what’s coming down from Washington, D.C., and what’s happening in Sin City. There’s a direct correlation between White House policy—especially its jihad against international tourism—and the woes of Las Vegas, which started worsening appreciably in February. Maybe Hill is a loyal Republican or perhaps he’s a clueless Democrat. Either way, he’s failing to rock a boat which has been scuttled by the federal government, in whose sins he is largely complicit. As the Culinary Union‘s Ted Papageorge recently said (we paraphrase), it doesn’t matter if your tips are untaxed when visitation to Vegas is sinking like a stone.
Already Hill seems to be spinning in advance, in case the next Las Vegas Grand Prix (an event intended to stimulate, ahem, overseas visitation) underperforms. “It’s not so much attendance,” he asserts, as though the race were some sort of performative theatre, with the citizens of Las Vegas the unwilling audience. “We could never buy that kind of coverage.” Oh yes, you can, judging by the compliance of most local media in pushing the Hill narrative. There’s a good reason Hill served up so much B.S. this week: He’s full of crap.
At least Hill didn’t bring up the feckless Sacramento A’s, whose vanity park on the Strip is limping forward, absent any contribution from team owner John Fisher. A superb exposé by Corey Levitan laid bare Emperor Fisher’s nakedness. As best we can make out, Fisher’s strategy is to exhaust the $650 million he scammed out of the taxpayers and from Wall Street, then dun Nevada for the unpiad, $1.3 billion balance. Sure as shooting, Gov. Joe Lombardo (R) will undoubtedly rip off starving, undereducated school kids yet again to bail out Fisher, and the Lege and Clark County Commission will be only too happy to back his play, serenaded by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which never saw corporate welfare it didn’t like.
Irony is Dead Dept. In case you missed it, Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small (D), currently battling criminal charges, had the audacity to warn New York City against building new casinos. With crocodile solicitude, Small asked, “Will they serve the people who live where they’re built —or just the investors who own them?” As opposed to the civic-minded casino barons of the Boardwalk, Marty? The ones who are constantly trying to Christian-down their tax obligations? Small actually uses Atlantic City as a cautionary tale of how not to develop casinos, then claims to have solved the problem.
“We’ve cut property taxes for six straight years,” says Hizzoner. Would those happen to be the same years that Atlantic City has been run from Trenton? ” We also secured $50 million to rebuild our Boardwalk, repair streets, and strengthen coastal resilience — all with state and federal funding.” Ah, but without the help (apparently) of your signature industry … and you can now kiss federal aid goodbye. “Casinos alone don’t build cities. People do,” pontificates Small. We hate to break it to him but New York City is long since built … and Atlantic City makes a poor example of what the Big Apple should be doing. Don’t you have a felony rap to beat, sir?
If the Atlantic City Mayor Small & wife gets jury trials, my guess will be a “hung jury”, deadlocked.
“Christian-down”–nice. I for one know what term you’re parodying there.