Las Vegas gambling and hotel revenues are progressively showing signs of a slowdown, many Las Vegas hotels and other establishments are currently reducing their rates and offering tons of discount coupons or even free nights as a way to bring more visitors and increase the money flow. Some hotels and casinos have reported loses including the Sands, MGM and most recently the Tropicana, which has already filed for bankruptcy protection. Some of these hotels are also getting rid of hundreds of workers as a way to reduce their costs and mitigate the financial problems. However, the Las Vegas Hotels’ stock prices have dropped like led balls since last year and looking for the funds to finance the new hotel projects is harder than a few years ago. Even the Las Vegas visitors are tighten their budgets and have already started looking for solutions that would help them to reduce the cost of a regular vacation, including Las Vegas coupons and promotions offered online.

The actual situation for the Las Vegas hotels and casinos would be even worse if not for the large amount of foreign visitors that the city receives every year and in 2007, foreign customers represented over 15% of the total visitors. Las Vegas machinery including its hotels, clubs, bars and casinos fully depend on the gamblers and tourists. Even when the economic decline still relatively low, the Las Vegas investors have a large list of new projects including casinos and hotels and an extended national recession could put these investors against the wall.

For decades, Las Vegas has projected a “recession proof” image, but in this case, some experts said they are worried because this recession could be different from the last two. The high prices of fuel and food plus the home values and increasing unemployment rates are taking Americans to consider every single dollar they spend. Also, gambling went from 58% to 41% of the of the total revenue in 18 years, a situation that its making Las Vegas “as vulnerable as other communities” according to J. Terrence Lanni, chairman of the board of MGM Mirage. But Lanni said that there’s also a light at the end of the tunnel and predicts that most of the projects planned for Las Vegas will be dropped in the next years, giving Las Vegas some time to concentrate in other important plans such as the construction of a new airport and other facilities that will ease the expansion in future years.