LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — If you've been reading social media at all lately, you've undoubtedly encountered people saying Las Vegas is dead or dying.
Whether on X, or Reddit, or Instagram, there are people predicting that Las Vegas's demise is at hand.
The alleged culprit: High prices for hotel rooms, food, resort fees, paid parking and in-room minibars. Or cultural changes that see fewer young people traveling to gamble, or the cache of wide-open gambling getting stale. Or dirty streets, crime, homelessness and the pervasive smell of marijuana on the Strip.
The smell? Oh, yes: "Vegas is expensive and smells bad," said someone called Adult Human Female on X.
Channel 13 reached out to local experts to ask about the death of Las Vegas, and some of the reasons that people might be joining the bashing on social media. Here's what we learned:
"I think a lot of people are stuck in their minds, whether they're Gen Xers or boomers or even millennials, [they] have an idea of what Las Vegas is supposed to be...and a lot of those ideas are pre-COVID shutdown," says James Reza, a Las Vegas native, journalist and businessman. "So my initial reaction is that the internet is full of a lot of uninformed people who like to complain, but also for each individual person, there's probably some kernel of truth to what their complaints are about."
Most of those complaints center on costs, whether for rooms and fees or for food. More than one person referenced the Las Vegas-famous 99-cent shrimp cocktail, which Reza notes hasn't been regularly offered in town since 1991.
Prices have risen everywhere, not just Las Vegas. But here in town, the days of cheap food and basic hotel rooms have given way to more upscale accommodations and experiences, including shopping, dining, concerts or sporting events.
"In the past, when [Las Vegas] was a gambling Mecca, hotel rooms were basically four walls and a bed where you took a nap between your gambling binges," Reza said. "Today, people want and demand luxury, so you can't expect Wynn 2025 at Circus Circus 1985 prices. And I think that's where a lot of the disconnect comes."
And the casino industry is taking notice of the complaints. Room rates are dropping. Some casinos — such as Resorts World — are returning at least temporarily to free parking and advertising a lack of resort fees. And public pressure, in part, led to reforms that require casinos to advertise the actual cost of rooms — fees and all — online before people click to book.
But the complaints persist, which is leading to some changes in visitor behavior, says Howard Stutz, a longtime Las Vegas journalist who now covers the gambling industry for the Nevada Independent.
Asked if Las Vegas has forgotten the value customer, Stutz said they're simply changing venues.
"Well, guess where they're going? Red Rock Resorts. Boyd Gaming properties," Stutz said. "They all did well in the last quarter. It's a lot of locals, because locals don't go to the Strip and aren't going to pay the prices down there. ...The out-of-town visitors from Southern California, they're discovering some of the local properties."
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And those locals casinos offer amenities that tourists used to find on the Strip, including spas, restaurants at all price points and — best of all — free and ample parking.
In some ways, Las Vegas has become the victim of its own success, exporting gambling to nearly every other state. As a result, this city has had to constantly reinvent itself, offering new and ever-more-buzzworthy attractions to keep people coming.
It doesn't always work: Stutz acknowledged a dip in tourism numbers, including Canadian visitation, in the wake of President Donald Trump's tariff wars and his rhetoric about making that country into America's 51st state.
But Stutz cautioned not to read too much into the numbers — at least for right now.
"I just know from talking to customers, talking to people around town, talking to the executives, talking to analysts who watch this closely: We're in a blip," he said. "We'll see where, how long it lasts. That'll be the question. If it doesn't come back up by the end of the year, then you and I have another conversation."
And the blip may, at least in part, be due to the aftermath COVID-19 pandemic, which left people with extra money from relief funds and a pent-up demand to have fun.
"We got spoiled after the pandemic," Stutz said. "Gaming numbers just shot up. The town packed up so quickly because people were just tired of being stuck at home. ...So all of a sudden, we're seeing declines. We had to expect that, at some point, it wasn't going to continue."
Speaking just before he addressed the annual Perspective event sponsored by the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance on Thursday, analyst Jeremy Aguero said he's heard the question — is Las Vegas dying? — before.
"I got that same question when [Steve] Wynn was opening The Mirage in 1989, could we ever be able to do it?" Aguero said. "And then you and I remember what it was like during September 11, when Las Vegas was never going to bounce back. What about during the Great Recession, when somebody wrote that Las Vegas was the nation's greatest ghost town in waiting, right? And then during the pandemic, we all did it, we all took that walk down the Strip when nobody was there. It was unbelievably scary in terms of how are we going to bounce back? And yet, still, here we are today. It's not how many times you get knocked down, it's how many times you get back up."
