Las Vegas is hurting. Tourism numbers are nosediving, and the operators of casino-hotels are scrambling.
In April, the city reported a drop of 180,000 visitors compared to the same month in 2024. Visitor volume has declined by nearly 8%, and gaming revenue is down nearly 5%. So many revenue targets are being missed in Las Vegas that the casinos have been firing dealers and replacing them with automation.
While bookings by convention-goers are up slightly, "analysts warn that event-driven boosts are unlikely to offset the broader declines," reports Moneywise. As the overall economy struggles, even many of those business bookings could dry up.
Las Vegas' latest posted unemployment rate, driven largely by losses in the tourism and gaming sectors, is 5.2%—one of the worst rates in any U.S. metropolitan area.
The situation shows no signs of improving this summer. Advance bookings from Canada to the United States, which normally prop up the U.S. tourism industry, are now down by about 70% compared to last summer.
So what is the 4-year-old Resorts World Las Vegas doing to stanch the losses?
The gargantuan, multiproperty Strip complex is waiving its resort fee across 3,500-odd rooms, all summer long.
Surprise! Was it always that easy?
The only casino resort on the Strip without resort fees
The Hilton, Conrad, and Crockfords hotels contained within the Resorts World campus have announced they'll simply waive their usual resort fees for stays of up to 5 nights through September 8.
Now Resorts World is the only major property on the Strip that isn't charging resort fees. (Casino Royale, a small Best Western property on the Strip, lacked them to begin with.)
But that's not all Resorts World has done now that the market is no longer favorable. The complex also got rid of its $18 parking fee for the summer (May 30–August 28).
If you're old enough, you'll recognize that all Resorts World has really done is put things back to the way they used to be in Las Vegas. No resort fees and no parking fees used to be the standard. That was Las Vegas' way of telling vacationers they were welcome.
When times boomed, though, hoteliers yanked those privileges, making everyone pay to park and carving off part of the true expense of a stay as a separate fee.
The casual speed at which Las Vegas hotels are able to rescind and implement resort and parking fees is perhaps proof that the hospitality industry could easily operate without charging the fees to begin with.
The scammy world of resort fees
Frommer's has long stood firm against the deceptive pricing practice of resort fees, which are used to hide the true cost of a room from hotel booking engines, displacing cheaper hotels from the first page of search results. (New federal rules about junk fee disclosures should curb that deception.)
Resort fees also cheat travel advisors, since hotels only pay commission on the base room rate and not the add-on fee.
We've seen Las Vegas ditch resort fees before as a marketing ploy when times got tight. Some struggling Vegas hotels suspended fees in the summer of 2020—though other properties kept collecting resort fees even though the amenities that hotels claimed the fees paid for were unavailable to guests because of the pandemic. Scammy!
This summer, if you want to save on resort fees and parking charges on the Strip—which in this case would normally cost more than $75 a day, including tax—then Resorts World Las Vegas is your only choice.
If we want to reward hotels that abandon underhanded resort fees, then we have to vote with our dollars.
But when Resorts World drops its newfound customer appreciation like a hot potato when times are better, remember that, too.