After a 12-hour flight from Frankfurt, Germany, touched down in Las Vegas on Monday, Michael Sudbeck and his wife were ready to get their vacation started.
“Tomorrow, we will go to the Grand Canyon, then we will spend two days in Las Vegas sightseeing and going to the different hotels,” Sudbeck said minutes after arriving at Harry Reid International Airport late Monday afternoon.
No matter how much the couple spends at resorts and other destinations in and around Las Vegas this week — they’re staying at the Bellagio — tourism officials are just happy to have them here.
The couple’s plane, a Lufthansa Group Eurowings Discover flight from Frankfurt, represented the first of its kind from Germany to fly to Las Vegas since the near complete shutdown of international commercial flights into the city following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020.
While Germany isn’t traditionally a large feeder country for Las Vegas travel — of the over 5 million international travelers to the city during the pre-pandemic year of 2019, about 224,000 were from the European country — it marks another step in the tourism recovery in Southern Nevada.
Along with service from Frankfurt, service to Las Vegas from Munich and Zurich, Switzerland, also returned this week.
“With those three markets, that’s really a gateway for us into the greater part of Europe,” said Fletch Brunelle, vice president of marketing for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. “There’s quite a bit of demand now for the U.S. and for Las Vegas. As we talk to our tour operator partners and travel agents, they tell us there’s a lot of demand for Las Vegas, specifically.”
The nonstop flights from Las Vegas to Germany run four times weekly to Frankfurt and twice weekly to Munich, according to airport officials.
In 2019, Las Vegas over 42 million visitors, though that number was cut about in half in 2020 because of the effect of the pandemic on travel. Last year, the city welcomed about 32 million visitors.
While domestic travel has made great strides, international travel remains one of the missing puzzle pieces for the Las Vegas recovery. As soon as next month, Las Vegas airport officials say they will have 16 different international carriers — with nonstop flights to 17 international destinations — in operation.
“We’re building back to where we were bit by bit, which is exciting,” said Chris Jones, the airport’s top marketing executive. “At the airport, we did 51.5 million passengers in 2019, and we were a little shy of 40 million last year. The way it’s shaping up these first few months this year, I’m not sure we’ll back to 51 million in 2022, but, if not, hopefully we’ll get there the following year.”
Jones said airport officials were feeling good about the menu of international flight options for passengers in 2020 right before the pandemic hit. While nobody knows exactly when Las Vegas will get back to its pre-pandemic level of over 42 million visitors, there seems little doubt from tourism officials that it will happen in the next year or two.
“Before the pandemic, close to 15% of all visitors were international, so we want to get that back to where it was as quickly as possible,” Brunelle said. “We know that Omicron is causing some issues now in the Far East, so that may take some more time, but we’re optimistic that, when we take a look to next year, particularly the second half of next year, we’re feeling very good about the overall prospects for things coming back.”
For the Sudbecks, the trip to Southern Nevada — and Arizona and the Grand Canyon — represented the first time either had been on an airplane since the start of the pandemic.
“We’re excited to be back,” Michael Sudbeck said. “Hopefully, we won’t do too much gambling.”