‘This is a great metaphor for the death of Vegas,’ I said, indicating the room I was in. The journalist I was with had billed it as an exclusive club where illusionists tried out their latest tricks, but it was more like a support group for unemployed magicians. Most of them were standing behind trestle tables, trying to sell homemade instructional videos of how to perform their ‘patented’ magic tricks. No one was buying.
‘Shshshsh,’ said the journalist. ‘We’re not allowed to use the “d” word. Vegas is supposed to be this fun, exciting place. Everyone’s terrified that if people get wind of the fact that the city’s in trouble they’ll stop coming.’
Alas, it looks as if the word is already out. Hotel occupancy in January 2009 stood at 71.9 per cent, down from 84.9 per cent in January of last year — and this in spite of the fact that the big hotel casinos have slashed their room rates. Every local has a story about how cheap the rooms are now. An English cocktail waitress told me that her brother, who’s visiting with his girlfriend, had managed to book ten nights at the Sahara for $70. According to her, these cheap-as-chips prices are attracting the wrong sort of tourist.
‘If you drive down the Strip on a Friday night, you really notice the change,’ she said. ‘You used to see these cool, good- looking people, all dressed up in their party clothes, but now it’s people from the Midwest in sweatpants. The locals hate them because they don’t tip.’
Cheap hotel rooms aren’t the only bargains to be had. Last December, a billionaire businessman called Phil Ruffin bought Treasure Island, one of the largest hotel-casinos on the Strip, for $775 million. To give you a sense of just how cheap this is, the same businessman sold a hotel-casino called the Frontier for a record-breaking $1.25 billion in May 2007. The Frontier was considered such a dump that the new owners — an Israeli real-estate group called Elad — immediately demolished it.
I was staying in the M-Resort, Vegas’s newest hotel-casino which is about ten miles from the Strip. It is what is known as a ‘locals’ hotel’, meaning it’s designed to appeal to locals rather than holidaymakers, which may be a smart move, given the state of the tourism industry. On the other hand, it might not. Unemployment in the state of Nevada is 10.1 per cent, compared to a national average of 8.9 per cent. I spoke to a female reporter who applied for a job as a ‘pool waitress’ at the M-Resort to supplement her income from journalism.
‘I must have applied to half-a-dozen hotels and didn’t get so much as a call back,’ she said. ‘The line to get a job as a pool waitress at the Palms was four hours long. It was like watching a car wreck of people’s hopes and dreams.’ One indication of just how desperate things are is the war that’s broken out between the city’s two biggest strip clubs, Rick’s and Spearmint Rhino. So anxious are they to attract customers, they’re now offering taxi drivers $50 a head for every person they drop off on their doorsteps. As a result, cab drivers trawl the Strip, searching for punters. I managed to extract $30 from one driver in return for delivering me to Spearmint Rhino. When I got there, I discovered the doorman wanted a ‘cover charge’ of $50 so I flagged down another taxi and told the driver to take me back to the Strip. I ended up $15 richer — which isn’t something many people can say after a night in Vegas.
Perhaps the clearest sign that the city is in trouble was the warm reception given to the 25,000 Brits who came to see the Hatton fight. Last time the ‘Hatton Horde’ was in town in 2008, the locals were appalled. For the first time in its history, the MGM Grand shut down all its bars in the hope that these overweight men in their Manchester United shirts would go elsewhere. This time round, the locals were singing a different tune.
‘I made $1,500 that weekend,’ said the driver who took me to Spearmint Rhino. ‘You can say what you like about those British guys, but they love to go to strip clubs. I wish they’d come here every weekend.’
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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