by Calculated Risk on 2/10/2020 11:44:00 AM

Another update ... during the recession, I wrote about the troubles in Las Vegas and included a chart of visitor and convention attendance: Lost Vegas.

Since then both Las Vegas visitor and convention traffic has recovered.

Visitor traffic was up 1.0% from 2018, and about 1.0% below the record set in 2016.

Here is the data from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.  

Click on graph for larger image.

The blue bars are annual visitor traffic (left scale), and the red line is convention attendance (right scale). 

Convention traffic was up 2.3% in 2019 compared to 2018, and was slightly above the previous record set in 2017.

There were many housing related conventions during the housing bubble, so it took some time for convention traffic to recover.   Now there are marijuana conventions boosting traffic!

From the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority:

While usually a relatively slower convention month, December 2019 bucked the trend as the destination enjoyed particularly strong convention attendance estimated at 356,100, +60.6% over last December; the YoY increase is largely due to the scheduling of Amazon Web Services (65k attendees) and Marijuana Business Conference (35k attendees) in December this year vs. November in 2018, plus the rotation of American Society of Health‐System Pharmacists (20k attendees) into the destination.