Global Gaming Business, hardly a canary in a coalmine, must think the Covid-19 pandemic is pretty horrendous for it to blast a special report today that Las Vegas Strip casinos are “barely surviving” at the moment. No conventions, scant air traffic, no shows = trouble. Or, as the headline puts it, the Strip is “battening down the hatches.” Global Market Advisors economist Steve Gallaway minces no words: “until airborne tourism and the convention trade return to something like pre-pandemic levels, the market will remain a shadow of what it was.” Pre-pandemic levels? That could be quite a wait. It took over a decade to regain what was lost in the Great Recession of 2008. Currently, tourism is 40% of what it was before we heard the word ‘Coronavirus.’
Visitor volume did ramp up significantly from June to July (August numbers are not available yet) and gaming win is at 52% of pre-virus levels. “The people we’re seeing come to Vegas are your core gamers,” says Gallaway. “Counts are down, but they’re getting good revenue out of those gamers. It shows that operators are working their databases and it shows that gamblers want to gamble.”
Had China and the World Health Organization acted responsibly at the onset of the pandemic instead of covering it up and obfuscating the entire situation, including deaths and economic destruction, would have have been significantly less.
Weary of hearing the media narrative the sole responsibility lies with President Trump and the Republican dominated states.
Las Vegas, along with the rest of the United States and the world, will recover sooner than is envisioned. People won’t forever sit on their asses at home and order in food and shop online.
There is only one Las Vegas on this Planet and people will return.
Nobody ever claims the President is “solely responsible” for the devastation and hundreds of thousands of deaths, he is responsible for purposely downplaying the dangers, for leaving it up to the states to fend for themselves, for never ramping up testing sufficiently, and sidelining the scientists and listening to advisors interested in his re-election. Other countries did exponentially better than we are doing and did, the United States should do better than smaller, weaker countries…
I was just there for 8 days, 2 days Flamingo, 3 days Orleans, and 3 days Harrahs. In my opinion, if you want to slow the spread, ban smoking in casinos, and police the wearing of masks. I saw more people smoking who kept their mask off, and other people not wearing them right or not at all. We wore ours as soon as we left the room and only took them down to take a drink when we had one. We also used their hand sanitizer often and tried to maintain a distance from other players.