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ists came on the weekends. And with tourism accounting for 46 percent of employment
in southern Nevada, the greater the occupancy rate, the greater the job security. Familiar
footage of celebrities and ordinary Americans wearing fashions from decades ago chron-
icled the changes over the years until 2012, when the convention center looks dated and
slightly down at the heel after the recession.
Global business, though, is where Las Vegas is looking for growth. A third, international
terminal opened in June 2012 with new business from Europe and South America. The
city's website offers translations in twelve languages. Chris Meyer, vice president of con-
vention sales for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, told me that Las Vegas
has been pushing the Obama administration to make all of the changes to put the country
back on the global stage.
“Everything they're doing is a page from what we have done. A visitor's fee to pay for
promotion, marketing on the Internet,” he said. “We pushed hard for the Travel and Tour-
ism Act because we all need national-level promotion. In Las Vegas our international
guests make up almost one-third of our business.”
“The beautiful thing about the federal government realizing the value of travel and
tourism is that it means a change throughout,” added Meyer.
He hopes that the United States will have a single national presence at the big tourism
trade shows instead of the current arrangement where each of the fifty states—whether
Nevada, California, New York, Florida, Illinois or Maine—has to put up a booth for itself.
The result is sometimes laughable. I attended the New York travel and tourism show,
where Thailand, for instance, had a handsome display with a dozen thick magazine-size
pamphlets showing how to have a golf vacation, or a beach vacation, a hiking vacation, or
a spa vacation in that country. A Thai dance ensemble performed at regular intervals and
Thai food was served.
In the American section, the booths were from the eastern states, with less polished
pamphlets extolling river canoe trips in Delaware and the rocky coast of Maine. The only
federal presence was the U.S. customs and border protection booth that handed out in-
structional booklets on how to prepare to go through borders, why the U.S. was building a
fence dividing the country from Mexico, or the fears of “agro-terrorism.”
As Meyer said, that is no way to get the message out about the rich diversity of travel in
the United States. The biggest foreign competitor for international meetings is Germany
and its cities: Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin. They do not waste time
with some amateur presentations. “Germany has the infrastructure—the modern high-
ways, railroads and rail links, airports and the top-tier—the tier-one—hotels and conven-
tion halls,” he said.
Those competitors have representatives throughout the United States trying to grab
some of the $460 billion annual business from meetings and events. Joe Lustenberger, a
Swiss hotelier, represents an association called Euromic that books smaller conventions
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