Just What Vegas Needs: 46,000 New Hotel Rooms

Tonight I looked over a eye-popping chart in the WSJ. It was a list of planned hotel/casinos that are being built in Las Vegas. I counted more than 12,000 planned rooms, and thought, “how could one city possibly fill up that many hotel rooms?

But the answer is equally impressive: Today the city of sin’s 154,000 hotel rooms are occupied more than 92% of the time, and this is a full third more than anywhere else in the US.

So the fact is, the 46,000 more rooms on their way will likely be quickly filled up. So companies like Wynn and MGM will keep on pouring billions into amenity filled hotels with names like ‘Encore’ ‘CityCenter’ and ‘The Plaza.’

One small hitch didn’t seem to bother the Israeli owner of New York’s Plaza chain. There is already another hotel with this name in the city’s downtown called Plaza Las Vegas. “We’re not anticipating any issues,” said a spokesman.

The part I don’t understand is, where will all the water come from to run the 46,000 new showers?