CHAPEL OWNERS HOPE WEDDINGS STAY HERE

There's this segment from the "What Happens Here, Stays Here" ad campaign: A slightly dazed woman says a tender but incredulous goodbye to a younger man she just spontaneously married.

Then there's the entire "What Happens In Vegas" feature-length movie, in which Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz play strangers who drunkenly get married and spend the rest of the film scheming to get their hands on a jackpot they won together.

And Britney Spears. Oh, lordy, don't even get started on Spears and her 55-hour Vegas wedding back in 2004. Her short-term "husband" admitted they did it just to be "wild," and her record company said it was a joke that had gone too far.

It all makes the local wedding industry look a little tawdry and fake, a group of chapel owners and wedding professionals said Thursday.

And now that New York City has thrown down the gauntlet and is bidding for wedding bell superiority -- adding to competition from Hawaii, Central America, the Caribbean and the cruise ship industry -- it's well past time for Las Vegas to fight back.

"I think you've dug yourself a hole," said Brian Mills of the Viva Las Vegas Wedding Chapel.

He was talking to representatives of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and R&R Partners, the ones responsible for the "What Happens Here, Stays Here" campaign. They were invited to talk about visitors authority resources that chapels could use for marketing.

The campaign helped cement the image of Las Vegas as a place to go hog wild, Mills said. But where's the magic? Where's the romance?

"That's your biggest PR problem," Mills said, adding, "Britney Spears hurt this place so bad. What she did was a joke."

New York City recently unveiled a $12 million renovation that turned a motor vehicles office into a pair of ornate wedding chapels, with city officials boasting that Las Vegas better "watch out" if it wants to keep its high status as an international wedding destination.

Local chapels are worried about that status.

The number of weddings performed here has plunged each year from a high of 128,000 in 2004. In 2008, there were 95,170 marriage licenses issued in Clark County, the lowest tally in more than a decade. In 2007, 4 percent of visitors reported a wedding as their primary reason for visiting Las Vegas, according to the visitors authority, with a nongaming impact of $875 million.

The economic downturn accounts for some of the decline, as does the increased competition. But chapel operators large and small say they haven't worked together enough to broadcast the variety of wedding options in Las Vegas, including everything from a quickie drive-through ceremony with an Elvis impersonator to nuptials with Red Rock Canyon or the Valley of Fire as a backdrop.

"I don't think we advertise the scope of weddings you can have here," said Scott Jason of Imagine Studios, the photography contractor at Caesars Palace. "Las Vegas is getting a lot of negative publicity lately. We need to change our image, at least as far as weddings are concerned."

Efforts to that end are under way, said Aurrice Duke, an account director at R&R Partners. Nine travel writers from Britain and Canada were given a tour of the area's various wedding amenities, and a contest and promotion tied to a popular soap opera will be announced next month.

Clark County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre, meanwhile, said the marriage bureau has experimented with line passes, which allow couples to come back and head straight to the front of the line at a specific time. That cuts down on waiting at peak times, such as on Valentine's Day or numerical oddity days like 8-8-08.

In the future, she said, couples will be able to fill out the license application online and bring a confirmation number to a designated window, which also will reduce wait times.

That's great, the chapel folks said. But they also wanted their own version of "What Happens Here, Stays Here," although something closer to "Virginia is for Lovers" would be preferred.

Some at the meeting said the visitors authority should set aside an advertising budget for the wedding industry, and the chapels are banding together for a marketing event of their own: a renewal of vows ceremony in June for Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman and his wife, Carolyn.

"We need a segment for the industry," said Joni Moss, a wedding consultant and representative of the Nevada Wedding Association. "We need a marketing campaign for the industry."

Contact reporter Alan Choate at achoate @reviewjournal.com or 702-229-6435.