Conventions, conferences, corporate meetings, trade shows – every region wants them. The convention industry, which in Nevada includes sport groups, creates a baseline of rooms occupied not just on weekends when leisure travelers are visiting, but during the week.
Las Vegas gets more than six million convention and trade show visitors annually. They’re the reason hotels are booked to 80 percent occupancy weekdays when the national average is around 60 percent, making it possible for southern Nevada to afford the resort properties its built. “We’re able to fill those rooms every day and not just on weekends,” said Steve Hill, president & CEO, Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority (LVCVA). “So really the trade show industry is what has allowed Las Vegas to be the Las Vegas that it is.”
“One thing that’s important about the meeting segment is their propensity to spend,” said Mike Larragueta, president and CEO, Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority (RSCVA). “They have huge banquets and catering, audio/visual needs, meeting rooms and they dine in city restaurants. A lot of the time they’re on expense budgets versus their own individual pockets. That’s a huge contributor to the bottom line for our hotels and for the economy. They also visit our retail, restaurants and breweries and add economic impact to our entire region.”
Why Meeting Planners Plan Their Meetings in Nevada
Nevada itself is a destination. For western states, it’s an easy drive. In northern Nevada, hosting conventions at the RSCVA brings visitors into the region. “It provides exposure for all these people that come from all over the country and see northern Nevada for the first time, and then they come back with their family or with friends and visit on their own, ” said Larragueta.
“Particularly in Vegas, I think what we offer just doesn’t exist elsewhere,” said Hill. “[There is a] wide range of offerings, whether that’s hotel rooms, dining experiences, venues or things for attendees to do when they’re not in meetings or at the trade shows. When there is a show in Las Vegas, attendance tends to be in high single digits, 9 percent higher on average than it is when shows are in other cities. People want to come to Las Vegas and the excitement that Las Vegas brings to anything translates into a better show, better business and a better experience for attendees.”
Northern Nevada is attractive to the convention segment because there’s quality of product. There’s accessibility. It’s easy to get around in Reno. The city prides itself in delivering exceptional customer service. And there are attractions—Lake Tahoe, Pyramid Lake, golf at Plumas, visiting Truckee, seeing Virginia City. There’s the ability to go from desert to alpine in less than an hour. There’s outdoor recreation opportunities during every one of the region’s four seasons.
“Plus it’s all about ease of doing business,” said Larragueta. “So many destinations are very restrictive when it comes to cancellations and attrition, and a lot of markets are very obviously dominant on the union side of the business. Nevada is quite the opposite. We don’t like to call out union or nonunion but it plays into it because of the costs associated with doing business in northern Nevada.”
The process of booking a convention or trade show can happen a couple different ways. “It really depends on the size of the show,” said Hill. “When people think about conventions they tend to think about the CES’s, the National Association of Broadcasters and SEMA, 150,000-person events. In that situation for those larger shows we certainly know the trade show market knows to call us or Mandalay Bay or the Venetian, because we have the venues that might work for their shows.”
When looking at smaller meetings and shows, anywhere from 1,000 to 40,000, there are third party event planning companies that work to find venues, maybe weighing the benefits of multiple cities. They issue requests for information or requests for proposals and about 70 percent use Cvent, industry software for event managing and marketing.
Visitor and convention authorities also reach out to organizers of events, creating site visits to showcase their regions, venues and amenities.
“We truly believe and live by the saying that seeing is believing, so we do everything we can to bring those customers here, whether through a third party decision maker or meeting planner, anybody who has the ability to sway that convention to select Reno Tahoe versus our competitors. We know if we can get them here to see and experience our region, we win more than we lose,” said Larragueta.
RSCVA has seven remote offices across the country, in Los Angeles, San Jose, St. Louis, Dayton, Dallas, Atlanta and Washington DC. The sole purpose of those offices is to discover and bring prospective meeting planners and decision makers to Reno, Tahoe and Sparks on site visits. That team, along with RSCVA in Reno and three members who work on sports events, represent 50 percent of the meetings, conventions and sports business contracted on an annual basis in northern Nevada.
“We are generally producing between 250- to 300,000 group and sports contracted room nights per year for future consumption,” said Larragueta.
Having visitors authority staff looking for conventions is as important as having a solid relationship with third party meeting planner groups like Helms-Briscoe, ConferenceDirect and Worldwide Buying Group.
By the (Very Large) Numbers
The biggest shows in Las Vegas are CES, the Consumer Electronics Show by CTA, in Vegas since 1978, and World of Concrete, National Association of Broadcasters, National Association of Home Builders’ International Builders Show and SEMA, which is the aftermarket car industry. These events make Las Vegas their venue partly because they’re so big and LVCVA can accommodate them.
“We have about 15 million-square-feet,” said Hill. “At the end of the pandemic there was 11.5 million-square-feet. Through the pandemic we just continued construction projects that added about 3.5 million.” That number is the space that events can use, not the entirety of the buildings which Hill said are typically twice that size. About half of the 15 million square feet is concrete space and the rest of it is carpeted ballrooms and meeting rooms.
“We own and operate the Reno-Sparks Convention Center, which is right next to the Atlantis,” said Larragueta. “That’s a 600,000-square-foot facility, and we have another 60,000-square-feet that we utilize on occasion for group business at our events center downtown. If you add in what the hotels all have that’s probably over another 400,000-square-feet, so we have over 1 million-square-feet [of convention space] in Washoe County.”
Not every event is limited to a week or less. When the United States Bowling (USB) Conference contracts with RSCVA they’re in the city for anywhere from four to six months as different facets play.
“An example of the economic importance and relevance that something like USB represents, when the men were here in 2023 for the open championship, they purchased over 100,000 room nights and had north of 50,000 bowlers. The economic impact was over $73 million,” said Larragueta.
Basically in northern Nevada overall occupancy numbers are represented by the group segment, and in Washoe County that varies between 15 and 20 percent, meaning on an annual basis 15 to 20 percent of 16,000 hotel rooms are occupied with a group segment.
Destination Diversity
Not every show is CES-sized. Anything more than 50 people coming to town together is considered a meeting. There are small trade shows in Vegas and some of the favorites include a pizza expo, a bar and nightclub trade show and a cigar show. There was a show in May focused on clean transportation and one in November will celebrate pop culture. “Pick an industry, there’s probably a show in Las Vegas,” said Hill.
Northern Nevada with the desert, the mountains, the outdoor recreation from biking and hiking to skiing and snowboarding and the added attraction of gaming attracts everything from Worldwide Buying Group’s trade shows for retailers that feature outdoor recreation retailers and fits perfectly with the region’s outdoor recreation, to smaller, more unique shows. Shows in northern Nevada tend to be smaller and more diverse than those in southern Nevada, like the Wild Sheep Foundation’s Sheep Show, an Arabian horse show, the northern California Volleyball Association.
Conventions and trade shows bring visitors into the host city. Overflow hotels benefit from increased room nights. Restaurants and retailers get the benefit of visitors. “We call it compression, where everybody is trying to fill hotel rooms or fill their business or fill their restaurant every night and you need 150,000 people who are willing to come to town and book hotel rooms. If a show comes to town and brings 20,000 of those people, [that’s great],” said Hill. “It’s one of the things that Las Vegas does really well. All of the property owners, the businesses in town, understand that what is good for Las Vegas ultimately is good for them. It might not be every single time but generally what is good for Vegas is good for each individual business in Vegas. And they work together really well to help elevate the city. Once we have something coming in, then [local businesses] compete for it, once it’s decided to be in Las Vegas.”
“We’ve roughly returned to the visitation and meetings we had prior to the pandemic,” said Hill. “We’re still just a little bit shy, and our goal is to grow into all that new space. We’re working hard to do that. It’s an awful lot of new space, but the city built it because we felt the demand was there and we’ve got the capacity, and we’re excited about that and working on new things as we continue to grow the [convention industry].”
