Las Vegas Vacation Blog Blog

The quickie wedding, long a Las Vegas tradition for romance-besotted tourists, may be the latest casualty of rough economic times. Fewer couples have been pledging their love in Sin City as the number of visitors has fallen and some couples postpone marriage or shun it entirely. “If you don’t have a stable job, it’s hard to say, ‘Let’s get married and start a family,’ ” says Diana Alba, clerk of Nevada’s Clark County, whose office issued 91,890 marriage licenses last year, down 16 percent from 2007.

Dianne Schiller, owner of Renta-Dress & Tux Shop, a wedding and formal wear store in Las Vegas, says her business has dropped 15 percent from two years ago, forcing her to stock more inexpensive gowns. “People are spending way less,” Schiller says. Adds Cliff Evarts, founder of chapel operator Vegas Weddings: “Gas prices, airplane ticket prices, all those things impact people’s ability or desire to come to Vegas.” Some 37.3 million people visited the city last year, down from 39.2 million in 2007, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

The slump is prompting the 90-plus wedding chapels in the county — where there are no requirements for blood tests or a waiting period — to shift their focus to husbands and wives seeking to renew their vows and “commitment ceremonies” for same-sex couples who can’t legally wed in Nevada. “Just because there is a decline in marriage certificates, there isn’t a decline in love,” says Charolette Richards, owner of the Little White Wedding Chapel, which offers drive-through service in its “Tunnel of Love.” Richards, who in 1987 married Bruce Willis and Demi Moore and has hosted weddings for Britney Spears and Joan Collins, says recommitment ceremonies now make up about a third of her business, a big increase over prior years. “People today are renewing their vows more than ever,” she says.

At $60 for a marriage license, Clark County has lost some $2 million in annual fees from weddings since the peak in 2004. Now the county is considering official certificates for couples renewing their matrimonial commitments, which could help make up some of the difference, Alba says. “If we did 1,000 annually and we charge, say, $45, that would still be some revenue that we didn’t have before,” she says. The certificates under consideration would be optional and would display the couple’s original wedding date. “We want it to be something fun,” Alba says. “There is a market among tourists, particularly from foreign countries, who want … a certificate that contains an official seal that says Las Vegas.”

Chapel operator Evarts is lobbying local officials to issue the certificates. Since 78 percent of visitors are married, he says, it’s smart to shift the focus away from weddings. That would allow companies such as his to market to some 30 million potential customers a year, as opposed to the far smaller number of single visitors. “There’s a real opportunity,” Evarts says, “for Vegas to reinvent itself as the vow renewal capital of the world.”

The bottom line: As the economy suffers, Las Vegas is seeing fewer quickie weddings, but at one chapel vow renewals now make up a third of business.

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Talk about rolling the dice and expecting a big payoff. Sir Philip Green, the owner of Arcadia Group, parent company of Topshop, is gambling that Topshop’s latest collection, Dress Up, will have him in the chips when the retail chain’s flagship store opens in Las Vegas next March.

The retail outpost will cost the high street magnate approximately $10 million to build, but he was sanguine about the move. He told WWD, “Dress Up, is just that: very elaborate, embellished pieces in fine silks and satin with beading and sequins. It will probably do quite well in Las Vegas, where we’ll have a bigger assortment of ‘going out’ apparel. Dresses is one of our strongest areas and evening shoes is also one of our strongest sellers. We’ll buy deeper into those categories.”

The UK’s largest privately owned clothing retailer with more than 2,500 outlets is striking while the iron is hot. Operating profit for Arcadia Group which includes Topshop and Topman as well as Miss Selfridge, Wallis and others was up 10 percent to £279.6m, with cash generation of £386.2 million, up £43 million for the fiscal year ended August 2010.
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Las Vegas bills itself as the entertainment capital of the world, but it should promote another strength that gets virtually no attention — its specialization in green architecture and construction services.

So says the co-author of a study released today by the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington on the nation’s clean economy, made up of industries that help save energy and water, support renewable resources and boost mass transit.

But green architecture jobs make up only a sliver of the clean economy. Brookings found that both the Las Vegas metropolitan area and Nevada as a whole are below average when it comes to creating jobs for the entire clean economy.

Brookings senior fellow Mark Muro said Las Vegas has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of jobs devoted to green architecture and construction versus the overall job market. There were 2,507 such jobs in Southern Nevada as of last year, producing a concentration seven times higher than the national average.

Muro, who doubles as co-director of Brookings Mountain West, a research collaboration with UNLV, said construction of the massive CityCenter on the Strip likely had a lot to do with the presence of such employers in Las Vegas. Since 2003, when there were just 157 green architecture and construction jobs in town, that employment sector has grown by more than 48 percent annually, Brookings found.

“You have an astonishing concentration of those jobs,” Muro said. “CityCenter was a massive LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) project that brought green architecture and construction companies to the region. So you have the talent in place. You may want to market that expertise both regionally and globally to other places that are arid, like the Middle East and Asia. You should build on your strengths based on the concentrations you have.”

The global architecture firm Gensler, cited by Brookings, is an example of a green architecture and construction company that has thrived in Las Vegas. Gensler served as CityCenter’s executive architect, helping the project become the world’s largest sustainable development that stresses energy savings.

“Nevada instituted a series of tax incentives to encourage the major employers in Nevada to undertake sustainable development,” said J.F. Finn III, a Gensler principal and managing director. “Green development quickly begets green consultants and contractors to service them.”
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On any given summer Sunday, a line forms as early as 7 a.m. and stretches through the Hard Rock Hotel. Patrons are dressed in their Sunday bests—barely-there bikinis and sky-high heels or board shorts and white tanks—waiting to worship at the mecca of the daylife scene, Hard Rock’s weekly Rehab pool party. Almost instantly they flock to the bar, grabbing Big Gulp-sized cups of mixed drinks and soon after, the pool is brimming with boozy 20-somethings. Want to swim? Good luck. But it doesn’t matter, anyway. Swimming is hardly the prime activity at these pools. Having a good time while spending money is.

Just to walk in the door at Rehab will cost you more than $100 on a busy weekend. Let me repeat that: $100 just to walk in the door. A place to sit? That’s going to cost you extra. A bottle of booze will run you hundreds more and somewhere to put that bottle, a cabana perhaps, costs thousands more. It’s easy to see why these pool parties are the new revenue darlings of casino operators.

Today’s Strip pool parties are a much different scene than the resort pools of yesteryear, where the high roller’s wife might park herself for a tan and an umbrella drink before meeting her husband for a show and dinner after a day of gambling. Now, it’s the place for the high roller to be and be seen and yet another sign of their temporary wealth, renting miniature suites in the form of cabanas with bed, flat-screen TVs, around-the-clock bar service and a flock of pretty girls. In the cabana next door, you might find the Kardashian du jour, Holly Madison or Jersey Shore’s The Situation, all cashing in on their 15 minutes of fame.

These pools have their own entrance lines with velvet ropes at the door and have the ability to charge night life prices, raking in as much as, if not more, than some of the city’s biggest nightclubs on busy weekend afternoons. It’s a trend that started on the yachts of St. Tropez and of Miami’s South Beach, where the partying starts during the morning hours and the booze flows straight through sundown, and has made its way to Las Vegas in recent years. They blur the lines of the city’s megaclubs and hotel pools, creating a whole new category of entertainment: The dayclub.

To outsiders, spending a Sunday packed in like sardines in the heat with nowhere to sit hardly seems like a pleasant way to spend a weekend. So what’s the appeal?

That’s the thought that ran through my mind as I stood in the middle of Tao Beach shortly after my arrival to Las Vegas in the summer of 2008. The scene was right out of MTV’s Spring Break circa 1997 with partyers dancing in the tiny pool and unnaturally proportioned women lounging in cabanas. It was my “We’re not in Kansas anymore” moment. I went only once. I might not be their target market (even though I’m their age demographic), but plenty of the “new Vegas” crowd is.

“People want to come out and get some sun by the pool no matter what, but making it a nightclub atmosphere just entices them more. Everybody wants to party and they want to be in the sun while they do it. A lot of pools are kick back and relax pools but these people came to Vegas for a reason,” says Ian Kohoutek, director of night life for Hard Rock, who helped launch Rehab in 2004.

It was like nothing Las Vegas had ever seen. Rehab became an instant hit first among locals, and soon out-of-towners were flying in just to get a piece of the debaucherous scene. The weekly party is now in its eighth season, but sans the reality show that gave it its bad-boy image, and draws as many as 5,000 partygoers on a busy Sunday. Even Rehab’s competitors give it credit for kicking off the daylife trend in Las Vegas.

“What’s driven this over the last eight years is the name has established itself in the market. We can open the door on a Sunday and people flock to the doors, despite who we might have as a DJ or hosting. The biggest thing for us is trying to work our way into the other days of the market. Everyone caught on to the trend that these pools parties actually work and we can make a ton of money with very little investment,” Kohoutek says.

Soon, Wet Republic popped up at MGM Grand, the topless pool party Bare opened at the Mirage and Ditch Fridays launched at the Palms, along with a dozen others. It was like a light bulb went off with night life operators: They realized the same deep pockets that were spending at nightclubs in the evenings were going untapped during the day.

“There are these high rollers who are staying at the Mansion at MGM Grand or the Emperor’s Suite at Caesars Palace and they want to come play at our pool party. They could have lost a bunch of money but they’re still paying cash here for their tab at Rehab,” Kohoutek says. “I’ve had investment bankers from New York, or celebrities or these guys from Silicon Valley who have just sold their companies and now have all this money to spend. These girls see these guys in the cabanas and think ‘I don’t need to buy drinks for the rest of the day.’”

Kohoutek remembers the days when pool parties first came on the scene and you could rent a cabana for $300. Now, everything has a food and beverage minimum, he says. Hard Rock’s Rehab requires its VIP cabana patrons to spend between $1,000 and $20,000 in food and beverage minimums.

Last summer, casino mogul Steve Wynn stepped into the pool party game, in true Steve Wynn fashion, spending $68 million to turn the former entrance of his $2.3 billion Encore Las Vegas into the massive and ultra luxurious Encore Beach Club. The party pool complex features 26 cabanas, many of which are Strip-front, and eight two-story, 350-square-foot bungalows with private pools and private bathrooms that garner five-digit tabs on some weekends. As a result, Wynn Resorts reported a 16 percent increase in food and beverage revenue in the third quarter of 2010 after Encore Beach Club’s opening, surpassing revenue generated in other departments, with the exception of gambling.

Other Strip casinos that have hopped on the night life and daylife trend are also reaping the benefits. According to an annual report from the Gaming Control Board released in February, beverage revenue rose seven percent during the 2010 fiscal year to $909.6 million, for the 39 casinos generating annual revenue of at least $1 million. That number compares to a two percent increase in fiscal 2009.
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The Las Vegas strip shines with self-promotion and promises to deliver the “wow” factor.

Las Vegas is a traditional vacation destination, but now they are hopping to attract a new kind of visitor, one who makes their travel plans through social networking.

Want to know what’s going on inside all the hotels? Just head to their Facebook pages, twitter, or youtube to find out.

“Social media in Las Vegas is remarkably important,” says David Koloski, Director of Social Media, Caesar’s Entertainment.

That’s because in Las Vegas there are so many options to chose from.

Caesar’s Entertainment has formed a new social media nerve center.

The conglomerate has eight hotels on the strip, and at the nerve center Twitter and Facebook pages of each property are monitored 24/7.

Guests can think of the web specialists who work there as a quick-responding, yet invisible, concierge.

“It’s the best way for them to actually get information in real time,” according to Koloski.

“Anything that really is going to enhance your overall trip, we look for technology to help serve that,” says Neal Narayani, Director Strategic Marketing, Caesars Entertainment.

Soon, all you may need in the desert oasis now is suntan lotion, and a cell phone.

“It’s really going towards mobile. Everything is looking towards technology that’s in your pocket,” says Narayani. “Everything is heading toward the app direction.

So now, nearly everything a visitor needs while in Las Vegas is now just a hand-held device away.

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