Navigating The Future In A City Where Business And Imagination Meet

Navigating the future in a city where business and imagination meet

- Lark Gould

Las Vegas is always in motion. Behind the neon and the crowds, cranes are in gear building a continuous line-up of new towers, new rooms, new attractions, and new entertainment complexes as far as the city can dream.

Some $18 billion in new construction projects are on the table through 2020 and marching toward a whopping room count just shy of 160,000 with the addition of some 14,000 hotel rooms coming online. Most of those rooms are concentrated within a nine-mile stretch that leads from Mandalay Bay to Downtown Las Vegas.

Fueling much of that action is the fact that Las Vegas is very easy and affordable to access. The destination currently facilitates nearly 950 daily flights providing excellent options for business travelers. In fact, McCarran International Airport has reported record-breaking passenger traffic of late. The month of May is on record as the busiest in the airport’s history with passenger traffic of 4,590,539.

“What has not changed is Las Vegas remains a unique global destination where there is just a ton of things to do, and at any hour of the day,” says Michael Goldsmith, founder of Las Vegas-based destination business development firm, Magellan. “Every decade or generation thinks Las Vegas is overbuilt and this place or that place will never be successful – but hotel occupancy continues to climb and there is a lot of construction on the books – so much so that Las Vegas will have the most hotel rooms in the world in one place.” Goldsmith brings some perspective; before his latest venture, he was vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) for 17 years.

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