Steve Hill has a complicated job right now. As president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, he is simultaneously the city’s chief booster and its most credible diagnostician. When he stood before the Nevada Economic Forum last week to brief the state’s independent budget forecasters, he didn’t sugarcoat what the data actually shows.
Las Vegas visitor volume is down 3.5 million to 4 million compared to 2019, when a record 42.5 million people came to the city. The gap hasn’t closed. If anything, it has proven more stubborn than tourism officials hoped when pandemic-era disruptions first began distorting the numbers. Gaming revenue has recovered and then some, reaching 135 percent of 2019 levels and up 2.3 percent from 2025, with $8.13 billion year to date as of July 2026. Live entertainment tax receipts on non-gaming establishments have risen 400 percent since 2019, generating more than $100 million in fiscal year 2026 alone. Convention attendance has surged 11.2 percent.
So the city is generating more money from fewer people. That’s a real achievement, and Hill acknowledged it. But it’s also a symptom of something that matters for Las Vegas’s long-term economic health: the visitors who have disappeared are not being replaced, and the single largest reason they haven’t come back is one that Las Vegas cannot fix by lowering prices or improving its product.
Canada has stopped coming.
The Numbers Behind the Collapse
Canadian visitors have historically been Las Vegas’s largest source of international travelers. Before the pandemic, between 1.4 million and 1.8 million Canadians visited the city annually, a reliable flow of high-spending leisure travelers with strong cultural affinity for Las Vegas’s particular brand of entertainment.
In 2025, Canadian arrivals fell to 1,196,300, a 17.4 percent year-over-year decline and a loss of 252,400 visitors compared to 2024. That was already well below the pre-pandemic baseline. As of August 2026, the situation has deteriorated further. Hill told the Nevada Economic Forum that Canadian tourism is now down 30 percent since 2019, a figure that represents the cumulative effect of multiple years of declining visitation from a market that once provided one of Las Vegas’s most predictable and substantial visitor streams.
In raw terms: if Canadian visitation in 2026 is 30 percent below 2019 levels, and the 2019 baseline sat around 1.5 million visitors, Las Vegas is currently receiving roughly 450,000 fewer Canadian visitors annually than it was in its pre-pandemic peak. At an estimated average spend of several thousand dollars per Canadian visitor trip, the economic impact of that loss runs into the hundreds of millions annually.
Major Canadian airlines have responded to the demand signal. Air Canada and WestJet reduced capacity on Las Vegas routes by 30 percent in early 2026. Flair Airlines, the low-cost carrier that had been an important access point for budget-conscious Canadian travelers, cut even more aggressively. Fewer seats at higher prices, compounding declining demand.
What Drove Canadians Away
The causes are political as much as economic, which is what makes the situation difficult for Las Vegas to address through conventional tourism marketing.
President Trump’s return to office in January 2025 coincided with trade disputes, tariff fights, repeated remarks framing Canada as a potential 51st state, and immigration policies that created anxiety for international travelers about the experience of entering the United States. Those factors collectively reduced American destinations’ appeal for Canadian leisure travelers in ways that had nothing to do with Las Vegas’s product quality or pricing.
The $250 Visa Integrity Fee introduced in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, while not yet applied to Canadian citizens specifically, signaled an orientation toward international travelers that the LVCVA directly criticized. “Las Vegas welcomes more than 5 million international visitors annually, and the $250 Visa Integrity Fee sends a message that those visitors aren’t welcome,” the LVCVA wrote in public comments.
That’s an unusually direct statement from a tourism authority that typically avoids political commentary. It reflects how seriously the LVCVA views the policy environment’s effect on visitor volume. Las Vegas can’t control whether Canadian travelers feel welcome entering the United States. It can only market vigorously to a market that federal policy has made more reluctant to travel.
The Airfare Problem on Top of Everything
Layered onto the Canadian collapse is an airfare problem that affects domestic travel and compounds the international headwinds.
Domestic airfares into Las Vegas jumped more than 20 percent over recent quarters, while the national average for domestic fares rose roughly 12 percent over the same period. Las Vegas is experiencing above-average fare inflation driven by a combination of factors: jet fuel costs rising sharply amid the Iran war that began in late February 2026, airline capacity adjustments pulling seats out of certain markets, and Las Vegas’s concentration of leisure travelers who are more price-sensitive than the business travelers who anchor other major airport markets.
Hill described the fare inflation as a potential drag on convention business, which has been the bright spot propping up Las Vegas’s overall numbers. Convention attendance growth of 11.2 percent reflects genuine demand for Las Vegas as a meeting and trade show destination. But if higher airfares make it more expensive for convention delegates to get to Las Vegas, that demand advantage erodes. Convention planners do price sensitivity analysis when selecting host cities. A market where getting there costs 20 percent more than alternatives loses bids at the margin.
Gaming Revenue Tells a Different Story
Here is the paradox that defines Las Vegas’s current moment: fewer visitors, more revenue.
Gaming win year-to-date through July reached $8.13 billion, 135 percent of 2019 levels and up 2.3 percent from 2025. Live entertainment revenues have grown 400 percent since 2019. Convention spending has increased. The people who are coming to Las Vegas are spending more than ever.
That’s partly a function of who’s left in the visitor pool. The budget-conscious travelers who were most sensitive to price signals, including a significant portion of Canadian visitors and domestic travelers from middle-income households, have pulled back. The higher-income travelers who spend more on premium hotel rooms, high-end dining, table games, and premium entertainment have remained engaged.
The result is revenue resilience at the cost of volume diversity. A visitor economy skewed toward high-spending travelers is economically efficient in the short term. It’s also more brittle. Wealthy leisure travelers have more options, more alternatives, and less geographic loyalty than budget travelers who have been finding Las Vegas one of the best value propositions in American entertainment for decades. If that segment shifts its preferences, the revenue that now masks the volume decline disappears faster than the volume numbers would suggest.
What $35 Million Can and Can’t Buy
The LVCVA launched a $35 million “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” campaign last year specifically to respond to the visitor volume decline. The campaign targeted both domestic markets and international visitors, aiming to reinforce Las Vegas’s value proposition and combat negative perceptions about pricing.
The campaign has had some effect. Year-to-date visitor volume through June 2026 showed a modest 0.2 percent increase compared to the same period in 2025, essentially flat but at least not continuing to decline. Hotel occupancy reached 82 percent. Those are stabilization metrics, not recovery metrics.
The Australian route partnership announced earlier this month, committing $1.45 million toward promoting the new Qantas nonstop Sydney-Las Vegas service, represents a targeted international strategy designed to diversify away from Canada by deepening the next-largest willing market. Australia sends 275,000 visitors annually even without a direct flight. Removing the connection friction should grow that number. But Australia at its optimistic ceiling doesn’t replace Canada at its pre-pandemic baseline. The math doesn’t work.
What the LVCVA cannot buy with any marketing campaign is a different federal policy environment. The Canadian situation is fundamentally a diplomatic and political problem dressed up as a tourism statistic. Until relations between the United States and Canada normalize and Canadian travelers feel genuinely welcome again, the visitor gap Hill described to the Nevada Economic Forum will persist regardless of how effectively Las Vegas markets itself.
What the Nevada Budget Depends On
Hill wasn’t briefing the Nevada Economic Forum as an abstract exercise in transparency. The forum’s job is to project General Fund revenues that the governor and legislature use to build the state budget. Tourism is Nevada’s largest General Fund contributor.
When the LVCVA CEO tells the state’s budget forecasters that headwinds are building, that convention growth may face airfare-driven pressure, and that the Canadian market recovery timeline is uncertain, he is providing the inputs that determine how much revenue Nevada can expect from its primary economic engine.
Persistent visitor volume at 3.5 million to 4 million below 2019 levels, combined with airfare inflation that may constrain convention demand, represents a budgetary risk scenario that Nevada’s fiscal planners need to incorporate. The gaming and entertainment revenue growth that has partially offset visitor volume declines provides cushion. It doesn’t eliminate the exposure.
Hill’s briefing to the forum is an unusual degree of transparency from a tourism authority accustomed to emphasizing positive narratives. That transparency itself is a signal: the situation warrants honest assessment rather than cheerleading, and the people making Nevada’s fiscal decisions need the honest version.
Key Insights
The divergence between Las Vegas gaming revenue at 135 percent of 2019 levels and visitor volume remaining 3.5 million to 4 million below 2019 levels reflects a visitor mix shift toward higher-spending travelers that creates short-term revenue resilience at the cost of the demographic diversity that made Las Vegas’s tourism economy broadly resilient across economic cycles.
Canadian visitation’s 30 percent decline since 2019, driven primarily by geopolitical and policy factors rather than product or pricing issues, represents a structural headwind that Las Vegas’s marketing infrastructure cannot address directly, requiring either federal policy normalization or successful market diversification to resolve.
Domestic airfare inflation of more than 20 percent into Las Vegas, roughly double the national average fare increase, threatens the convention attendance growth that has been the single strongest offset to leisure travel volume declines, creating compounding exposure if business travel pricing sensitivity begins matching the leisure travel sensitivity already visible in the numbers.
The LVCVA’s unusually direct public criticism of the Visa Integrity Fee, explicitly framing it as an unwelcoming message to international visitors, signals that the organization views the federal policy environment as a material threat to Las Vegas’s economic interests significant enough to override the conventional political caution that tourism authorities typically observe.
Sources
Vegas Inc LVCVA Forum Briefing
Nevada Globe Hill Warning Details
8 News Now Canadian Visitor Drop
Las Vegas Sun Canadian Arrivals Data
NewsBreak Airfare Inflation Report
