AMERICA THE EXCEPTIONAL - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 269

On the other hand, unlike gambling, it is not encumbered with mobsters and under-the-
table money laundering, with hit men or gangs. And in typical Las Vegas fashion, the city
is now the number-one choice for conventions in the United States and in the world. (As
boosters like to say, more people flock to Vegas every year than to Mecca.)
Every month the serious business of conventions is the subject of a public board meet-
ing of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. It is treated with the same import-
ance as a city council meeting. When I attended, it was standing room only and the talk
was of growing competition.
“This city is under attack,” said Charles Bowling, a board member from the industry
side as the president and CEO of the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino. “We are under at-
tack from other destinations. I travel around the country—in Chicago, Orlando, and they
are asking 'how can we steal business convention business from Las Vegas?' ” he warned
his fellow board members.
The topic under discussion was the announcement that for the eighteenth year in a row
Las Vegas ranked number one in the country for conventions. The board was reviewing
its strategy to renovate, improve and enlarge the vast Las Vegas Convention Center and
its “convention district.” The press release crowed that the 19,000 conventions and meet-
ings held in the city every year brought in $6.3 billion to the local economy and supported
58,000 jobs.
Both Chicago and Orlando have made extensive and expensive renovations of their
conference centers. Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's new mayor, was quoted in the Atlantic
magazine as saying Chicago planned to take back its old spot as number one for conven-
tions that it had lost to Las Vegas in the 1990s as well as several billion dollars of business
over the years.
Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, told me in an earlier interview at her office
that Emanuel should look no further than his city's dreary weather and its scattered hotels
and property. “Who is he kidding?” she asked. “We have beautiful weather and everything
is close. We have magnificent convention space. The quality of our care and service is the
highest in the country because we have good union jobs.”
She made the obvious but often-forgotten point that tourism cannot be outsourced,
which is why cities are fighting over the MICE business.
At the board meeting Mayor Goodman was more strategic. “With casino business mov-
ing out, our single most important business is conventions. Hotels, resorts, and gam-
ing—they are moving all over the country. Conventions are the backbone for us now,” she
told the panel and the audience.
The convention authority played a new video it had produced showing the history of
Las Vegas and meetings since 1959 with the opening of a much smaller convention cen-
ter and new hotels incorporating large meeting rooms. One reason for pushing the con-
vention business was to fill hotel rooms during the middle of the week; most of the tour-