Useful Insights For Future Travelling To Las Vegas
Airport air traffic reports aren’t the most exciting things to read about Las Vegas but they offer useful insights. When looking at a market like Las Vegas tourism and travel data often help explain some things that are on the mind. Hotel occupancy rates may help explain why hotel room prices were high or low and might be an indicator for prices in the near future. Likewise knowing if more or fewer people are visiting Las Vegas can help look at a similar macro picture. The number of visitors in Las Vegas helps to explain why prices are increasing or decreasing and even why it was so difficult to get a reservation at a particular restaurant.
This kind of information is helpful for making plans on where to visit in the future. The first weekend of March Madness has become the biggest weekend of the year for sports fans in Las Vegas. This didn’t happen overnight but it could have been seen by comparing what you see in casinos with your own eyes year over year or by simply tracking hotel occupancy and visitation in March of previous years.
Major entertainment events and conventions can make visiting Las Vegas a little more difficult on the wallet or more difficult to plan. Good luck trying to get a last minute reservation at SW Steakhouse at Wynn during the first weekend of March Madness. Likewise, good luck finding an affordable flight to Las Vegas or a last minute hotel room anywhere in the city during the Consumer Electronics Show.
When you look at air traffic numbers from the past it gives you a baseline for what to expect in the future. The future may be immediate and it may be a year down the road. In this week’s edition of Sunday News we took a quick look at traffic for the year at McCarran Airport. Through the first two months of 2016 air traffic ahead of last year by 8.1%. February alone increased 8.9% but some of that could be tied to the extra day for leap year.
Let’s look deeper at the people visiting Las Vegas by airplane and how that might affect future visits to Las Vegas.
More Americans are flying to Las Vegas. There was a 10.2% increase in the number of domestic passengers last month. Meanwhile, international terminal traffic was down 2.8%. This might not mean much today but the if the trend continues you might see flights increasing in price in the US and prices begin to decrease outside of the country.
Low Cost Airfare Increases To Vegas
American’s flying to Las Vegas are looking for less expensive prices more than ever. Discount airlines are leading the way with increased traffic. Last month, Frontier Air had 139.8% more passengers than in February 2015. Similarly, discount airline Spirit had 25.5% percent more passengers in February. Another discount airline, Spirit Airlines, closely mirrored their January traffic as their traffic is 25.8% higher for the year to date.
Americans flying to Las Vegas are looking for the least expensive way to get here. Despite numerous problems in the past year, Las Vegas-based Allegiant Air had 9.8% more passengers this February than in 2015. Even well established discount airlines such as JetBlue and Virgin America had increases in traffic exceeding 10% in February.
The remaining US legacy carriers (Delta, United, and American Airlines) showed only minor increases in travel to Las Vegas but none of these increases were as compelling as the discount airlines. Will the US3 legacy airlines lower prices to Las Vegas in the future? Probably not in the near future but maybe down the line. This is something that’s worth keeping an eye on.
Will discount airlines see the increase in traffic to Las Vegas and increase their prices? Again, probably not in the short term but possibly in the future. Maybe prices for the big guys will come down and prices for the little guys will increase. If prices meet in the middle which carriers will people lean towards?
