Amanda Belarmino, an assistant professor at UNLV’s Harrah College of Hospitality, spent more than two decades helping to manage casinos, hotels and restaurants before a move into higher education.
In today’s topsy-turvy economic climate, nobody knows exactly how healthy Las Vegas’ tourism sector will be next month or next year, but Belarmino might have as good an idea as anyone.
Vegas Inc spent some time with the former Caesars Entertainment and Plaza employee to get an idea of how the dominant economic sector in Southern Nevada has recovered from the worst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
In 2019, Las Vegas welcomed more than 42 million visitors. Through the first fourth months of 2022, the city already attracted more than 12 million. Are you surprised at how quickly the city has rebounded?
Initially, we all thought tourism would take a long time to rebound. We thought there would be lingering fears. A lot of us in the tourism industry were thinking back to what it was like after September 11, when it took a long time for tourism to recover. ... One thing that happened was that so many people had to cancel those 2020 vacations, but they still had the money and the desire to travel. There ended up being a huge pent-up demand that we didn’t expect.
In retrospect, you can kind of understand that everybody was at home for so long, and people got tired of being at home. The antithesis of being at home is coming to Las Vegas. The rebound was more than we thought it would be.
Has that pent-up demand reached its peak?
There will be a point, and we might be reaching it, where people aren’t doing that revenge travel. I still think people are more appreciative of travel than they may have been before the pandemic. We’ve been fortunate here with the timing of some of the things that have opened here, like Allegiant Stadium. It will continue to have a positive impact on the city. That’s true of the Golden Knights as well, and if we get the Oakland A’s or any other Major League Baseball team.
When people go to see their favorite teams play on the road, they go for one of two reasons—it’s because they think it will be a really good game or because the game is in a place that’s really fun to visit. We will always be the fun place to go, regardless of the importance of the sporting event.
Sports tourism has been emphasized a lot lately by Las Vegas officials, especially in TV, radio and online advertising. Have you found that to be savvy marketing?
It’s a great move when it comes to diversifying our tourism base. As a city and as a state, we obviously would like diversification in our economy where we’re not so reliant on hospitality and tourism, but this helps us become a larger entertainment venue. It helps us bring more people in during slower times. We have multiple identities and can appeal to multiple segments of customers.
When will international travel and convention business come back?
Even without conventions and international travel, we’re still going gangbusters, which is fascinating. International travel will lag behind conventions, because even though we’ve been lifting restrictions, other countries haven’t necessarily been doing that. I don’t think people will want to come to Vegas if they have to go home and quarantine for 30 days. When these segments come back, it [won’t] necessarily push us to a different level, but it will help our growth. In the next couple of years, we’re going to face issues related to inflation and gas prices, which doesn’t appear to be going down soon. If we continue to see those issues, that will likely impact domestic tourism, so hopefully international travel and conventions can help.
Economists have recently started to talk more about a possible U.S. recession on the horizon. How worried should Las Vegas be?
Having to lock all the doors was bad. That was a bad time, but once we were able to reopen, we were able to recover. Having an economic recession, though, has impacts on everyone. One of the things you see in this city is that there are very strong marketers here. Very smart people who know there are different ways to do pricing, different ways to do packaging. If we start to see that softening in the economy, we’ll see those adjustments being made.
The biggest indicator will be what happens this summer. We know people have less money, but we still see people coming. So how are people spending their money while they’re here? People tend to make small adjustments first, so maybe they won’t go to eat at the steakhouse. Maybe they’ll still go to the buffet, but it won’t be at Caesars Palace. Where will people make those shifts?
What is it like being an assistant professor at a college of hospitality right now?
For hospitality education, it’s fascinating. I know from working in hospitality that there’s been a lot of uncertainty in the past two or three years, but we see that companies are dying to hire more people right now, so we know jobs aren’t going away. With automation, I have done some robotics studies, and I can tell you that it’s going to be a while before most of these jobs are threatened. One of my students has a robot at our research facility and we’ve had a hard time finding someone who can actually program it, just to do an experiment. The idea that a hotel, with an already overburdened [information technology] department can bring in these robots, it’s not practical right now. We’ll see more of the back-end machine learning and things like that. In general, people don’t like to not have a person to talk to. We know that we can’t fully automate.