Tuesday, November 19, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

LasVegas.com site relaunched

Hotel companies partner for portal

Frank Han of Park Place Entertainment, Erick Rodriguez of LasVegas.com, and Peter Simon of Mandalay Resort Group stand beneath the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign on the Strip. Photo by Clint Karlsen.

Mandalay Resort Group and Park Place Entertainment Corp. today jointly launched a newly reconfigured Web site designed to ease travel to Las Vegas.

Today's relaunch of LasVegas.com is also the last best hope of casino companies to take back control of their own room inventory and rates, according to executives of both companies.

"What had been secret became transparent because of the Internet," said Peter Simon, founder of the new LasVegas.com.

"Customers we thought we owned we didn't. Expedia and all the other (travel Web) sites were selling rooms at high margins and making money they didn't deserve," said Simon, who is also senior vice president of Mandalay Resort Group.

"This is not part of a strategy to shift people from one property to another," said Park Place Entertainment Corp. Senior Vice President Frank Han. "This, I hope, is an opportunity to move people coming to Las Vegas from higher cost channels to lower cost channels.

"Secondly, in the grand scheme of things, LasVegas.com takes people who were going to go to Colorado or Orlando or Hawaii, and brings them to Las Vegas instead, shifting market share of the travel business here," Han said. "This is good for Park Place and Mandalay, but it's really good for Las Vegas."

Basically, casino operators sell Expedia and other travel Web sites blocks of rooms at heavily discounted, wholesale rates. The sites then work like an auction, raising the prices as demand increases and available rooms decrease. With other Web sites, however, the casino operators do not participate in any of those price increases.

With LasVegas.com, casino operators will control the prices charged and realize the proceeds of price increases, thus boosting profits and operating margins.

"Las Vegas is a unique destination," Mandalay Resort Group Senior Vice President John Marz said. The name Las Vegas "is one of the five best-known brands in the world, so it really deserves a site that can merchandise it. No other site in the world can duplicate that because no where else has the cache of Las Vegas."

Under the terms of a licensing agreement reached in March, Park Place and Mandalay will jointly own and operate LasVegas.com LLC, which will exclusively license the LasVegas.com site from its owner, Stephens Media Group, owner of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

"In the five years the Review-Journal operated LasVegas.com, we developed it into the largest and best site of its kind," said Sherman R. Frederick, publisher of the Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media Group.

"But in that process, we came to realize that a better site would be possible if we could bring the majority of the hotels in Las Vegas into a cooperative effort. That is achieved by the partnership with Park Place Entertainment and Mandalay Bay," he said.

The deal was structured so the newspaper and its online edition maintain complete autonomy.

"Actually, it was Sherm's idea," Simon said. "He had the good sense to recognize the site was going to require this push from suppliers' perspectives.

"You also have to give credit to Mike Ensign on this," he said.

Ensign is a major shareholder in Mandalay.

"He was concerned about how rooms were being sold and how it was affecting the money being made," Simon said.

The licensing agreement called for the development of an all-new LasVegas.com, which was already one of the most popular online city sites on the Internet.

The site is the first supplier-owned site and offers visitor-focused information about local businesses and services, said LasVegas.com President Erick Rodriguez, previously vice president of Sabre, parent company of Travelocity and a leading provider of global distribution services for the travel industry.

"The idea of putting travel professionals in charge of a travel site makes perfect sense," Stephens Media Interactive executive director Al Gibes said. "I hope they hit a home run and succeed right off the plate."

Using the name Las Vegas, already one of the top 10 Internet search terms according to The Lycos 50, is intended to make it easier for visitors to plan a vacation here.

"We hope the intuitiveness of the site will draw people to see what's available," said Rodriguez.

LasVegas.com already gets 1 million unique visitors per month, a number the new operators hope to double by the end of 2003, he said.

"Another way to drive people to the site is word of mouth, and then there are affiliated programs," he said. "We're entering into strategic relationships with (other) high volume sites and have the advantage (of name) over anyone else."

The partnership also plans to use newspaper and television advertising campaigns to drive users to the site.

"Our model is to keep our users confined within our site and making reservations through the site," he said.

Park Place and Mandalay, usually two of the biggest competitors in Las Vegas, are using the site to deliver real-time hotel rates in the Internet's first side-by-side comparative display, along with show tickets, air travel, tours and golf reservations.

"One of the main goals is to have a live front desk inventory booking system with last room availability. Everybody else will be out of rooms (and affiliated amenities) first," Gibes said.

Its content includes Las Vegas distinctions, weddings chapels, spas, shopping, dining, tours, history and local news.

The site is designed to be helpful to both the flying public and visitors who drive. Last year, 35 million people visited Las Vegas, half of them by air.

The site is designed for Las Vegas visitors, to help them easily select amenities they want and quickly make reservations.

The site also eliminates the clutter of other general travel Web sites that depend on advertisers for revenues. There are no advertisements for other cities or offers in which users are not interested.

LasVegas.com represents more than 130 hotels on or near the Strip and downtown, all major airlines, more than 100 shows, 300 restaurants, 30 top spas, 40 hotel and free-standing wedding chapels, a variety of signature tours, and six golf courses.

The site also offers visitor information from the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority and local news and background from the Review-Journal, Nevada's largest metropolitan daily newspaper, with a direct link to the newspaper's Web site, www.reviewjournal.com.

"The Las Vegas Review-Journal is still providing content so they'll have credible information. Users are one click away from the R-J throughout the Web site," Gibes said.

"By turning over the travel area to the hotels, we as Nevada's largest newspaper can concentrate on what we do best -- content," Frederick said.

"Our credibility in information providing and the hotels' power to deliver inventory is the perfect marriage. It will take Las Vegas Internet travel and information to an even higher level. I have no doubt LasVegas.com will remain the No. 1 travel and information site in the world for Las Vegas," he said.

Park Place, the largest gaming company in the world, owns or manages Caesars Palace, Las Vegas Hilton, Flamingo Las Vegas, Paris Las Vegas and Bally's.

Mandalay's Las Vegas hotels include Mandalay Bay Resort, Luxor, Excalibur, Circus Circus and Monte Carlo.

Simon said he had been "very concerned people from other cities were representing Las Vegas. Somebody had to take control and communicate the Las Vegas I know and bring back to the control of people in Las Vegas the distribution channels that we were rapidly losing," he said.