Laughlin Is Slowly Taking Over Vegas Tourism—Here's Why

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]We continue to see encouraging signs that tourism in Southern Nevada is bouncing back, but sometimes we don't realize that the strip, downtown Las Vegas, and the surrounding local resorts aren't the only tourist destinations within Clark County. Something is happening in the Nevada desert that nobody on the Las Vegas strip wants to talk about.

[00:00:18]The Las Vegas strip, it has a lot of things. We have an Eiffel Tower. We have a pyramid. We even knocked a volcano down so they could build a giant guitar over there. But what they haven't been able to recreate is the Colorado River.

[00:00:33]And a growing number of visitors are beginning to discover that that's what sets Laughlin apart.

[00:00:39]In January of this year, Las Vegas saw a 2.2% drop in tourism. Not a massive number on its own, but here's what makes it interesting. Laughlin's visitor volume was down slightly in February year-over-year, but in January, when Las Vegas saw a 2.2% drop in tourism, Laughlin was up a solid 6.5%.

[00:01:00]The January stat comparison. At the exact same time, just 90 minutes south of the strip, a small river town posted a 6.5% increase in visitors. And a growing share of those visitors, they weren't coming from California or Arizona. They were coming from Las Vegas itself. Vegas locals packing up on Friday, driving 90 minutes down the highway, and spending their weekend somewhere that isn't the city they live in. Not because they had to, because they wanted to. Which raises a question that the LVCVA, the organization paid hundreds of millions of dollars to promote Las Vegas tourism, has no good answer for. If your own residents are leaving town to gamble and relax somewhere cheaper, what does that tell you about what the strip has become? 90 minutes down the highway, a very different Nevada is waiting. One that some locals have been arguing that not only does it remind them of the old Vegas they once loved, but that it might be on its way to becoming the new Las Vegas. Replacing the corporate greed and short-term thinking private equity run mega casinos of the strip. This is Laughlin, Nevada.

[00:02:03]Part one. What Vegas used to be.

[00:02:06]Aquarius marketing VP Jessica Mock says what sets Laughlin apart from Las Vegas the river, the price points, and >> the old-school vibe that people just want the laid-back flip-flops, cut-off shorts, >> [music] >> um you know, $5 beer, uh you know, $10.99 pizza, and a concert. You know, I can take a water taxi from Aquarius down the river um instead of getting in an Uber.

[00:02:34]There's a phrase that keeps coming up when people talk about Laughlin.

[00:02:38]Old-school. And the person saying it isn't some retiree who hasn't been to Vegas since 1987. It's the marketing VP of one of Laughlin's biggest casino properties. A $5 beer, a $10.99 pizza, a water taxi down the Colorado River instead of an Uber. And the reason it works is because every Vegas local who hears it immediately thinks the same thing. That used to be Las Vegas. Not ancient history, either. That was the strip 15, 20 years ago. A place where a normal working family could book a room on a Thursday, get a decent steak dinner without pre-planning it 3 weeks in advance, sit at a blackjack table for a few hours, and walk away feeling like they'd actually had a good time without completely draining their bank account.

[00:03:18]The math used to make sense. You'd budget a few hundred dollars for a Vegas weekend, and that few hundred dollars would actually last the weekend. A room at a mid-tier property might run you $70 a night. All you can eat restaurants, and there were a lot of them, gave you more food than you could reasonably eat for 15 bucks. Drinks on the casino floor were cheap because the casino wanted you relaxed and gambling. That was the deal.

[00:03:41]You gave them your action at the tables, and they made the experience affordable enough that you'd come back. It was a system that worked for everybody. Vegas grew into the most visited tourist destination in America on the back of that system. Tens of millions of visitors a year. Not because Las Vegas was the most glamorous place on Earth, but because it was genuinely fun and genuinely accessible. Then something shifted. It didn't happen overnight. It crept in slowly, deal by deal, acquisition by acquisition. As the big casino corporations started getting swallowed up by even bigger ones, and the private equity playbook started getting applied to an industry that had always operated on volume and loyalty.

[00:04:18]Resort fees appeared out of nowhere and just never left. Parking, which had always been free because of course it was free, suddenly wasn't. The buffets started closing one by one, and nobody brought them back after COVID. Dynamic pricing, the same algorithm that makes your airline ticket more expensive when you search for it twice, quietly made its way into hotel room rates. And the locals noticed. Vegas locals have a complicated relationship with the strip.

[00:04:43]Most of them don't go that often. When you live somewhere, the tourist attractions lose their shine pretty fast. But the strip was always there as an option. A place you could take out-of-town guests, or catch a show, or just wander around on a Saturday night without it feeling like a financial commitment. That option started feeling less and less accessible as the prices climbed. UNLV hospitality professor Amanda Bellarmino says Las Vegas has a growing outbound tourist population looking for a nearby affordable destination.

[00:05:12]>> Laughlin's always been a good solid market, but I think we're seeing a little bit more now as people try to be a bit more creative in ways to stretch their dollars. A hospitality professor at UNLV put it plainly. Las Vegas has a growing outbound tourist population. 3 million people live in this metro area, and a rising number of them are actively looking for somewhere nearby, affordable, and fun to spend a weekend.

[00:05:36]Somewhere that scratches the same itch the strip used to scratch before the strip decided it had bigger fish to fry.

[00:05:42]Laughlin had been quietly sitting 90 minutes down the highway the whole time.

[00:05:46]Part two. What is Laughlin?

[00:05:49]Most people outside the Southwest have never heard of Laughlin, Nevada.

[00:05:53]And the ones who have usually can't tell you much about it other than the fact that there's a river there. So here's the actual story. In 1964, a man named Don Laughlin, a gaming entrepreneur from Owatonna, Minnesota, was flying his private plane over the tri-state area where Nevada, California, and Arizona meet. Below him was a stretch of desert riverbank that most people had written off as worthless. A dried-up little outpost called South Point. Eight abandoned motel rooms, nothing else. Don Laughlin saw something different. He purchased the property, and within 2 years had opened the Riverside Resort.

[00:06:27]12 slot machines, two gaming tables, four guest rooms, and an all-you-can-eat chicken dinner for 98 cents. He wasn't trying to compete with the strip. He was building something completely different.

[00:06:37]A no-frills, come-as-you-are gambling destination for working people who couldn't afford or simply didn't want the Vegas experience. It worked. Word spread. Other casinos followed. Through the 1980s, the town boomed with major properties like the Edgewater, the Colorado Belle, and what is now the Aquarius all opening along the casino corridor. By the late 1980s, Laughlin was genuinely competing with Reno as Nevada's second biggest gaming market.

[00:07:03]Don Laughlin even personally funded the construction of a bridge connecting Laughlin to Bullhead City, Arizona at a cost of $3.5 million, and then donated it to both states.

[00:07:13]That's the kind of operator he was.

[00:07:14]Old-school in the most literal sense.

[00:07:17]Then the 1990s happened. Tribal gaming compacts started getting signed across Arizona, New Mexico, and California.

[00:07:24]Laughlin's entire feeder market suddenly had casinos of its own. CDC gaming visitor numbers peaked and started declining. The big corporate operators who had moved in during the boom years started losing interest. Laughlin entered a long, slow plateau that it never fully recovered from. By 2013, the Las Vegas Review-Journal was describing it as a town that had seen nothing but declines for a dozen years. The 2.1 million visitors recorded that year was less than half the peak from 1997. And yet Laughlin never died. It just got quiet. Nine major casino resorts still operate there today, employing around 14,000 workers from both Nevada and Arizona. The prices stayed low because the market demanded it. The vibe stayed relaxed because nobody came in to gentrify it. While the strip spent two decades reinventing itself for billionaires and bachelor parties, Laughlin just kept being Laughlin, which as it turns out, is exactly what a growing number of people are now looking for. Part three. The data doesn't lie.

[00:08:23]Laughlin's visitor volume was down slightly in February year-over-year, but in January, when Las Vegas saw a 2.2% drop in tourism, Laughlin was up a solid 6.5%.

[00:08:35]Let's talk about what those numbers actually mean. A regular January. The kind of month where the strip lives or dies on its actual product, rather than a calendar event propping up the numbers. And when the monthly visitor figures came in, Las Vegas was down 2.2% while Laughlin was up 6.5%. The LVCVA would tell you one month doesn't make a trend. They'd be right, technically. But this didn't happen in a vacuum. UNLV hospitality professor Amanda Bellarmino says Las Vegas has a growing outbound tourist population looking for a nearby affordable destination.

[00:09:10]>> Laughlin's always been a good solid market, but I think we're seeing a little bit more now as people try to be a bit more creative in ways to stretch their dollars. A hospitality professor at UNLV has been watching this shift closely. 3 million people live in the Las Vegas metro area, and a growing share of them are quietly looking for somewhere nearby to spend a weekend that doesn't feel like a financial commitment. Just driving somewhere close, cheap, and easy. We've actually seen seen an increase in visitors from Las Vegas. A lot of Las Vegas locals are coming down to spend time at the river.

[00:09:43]The Aquarius casino in Laughlin has actually been tracking exactly this.

[00:09:47]More visitors coming specifically from Las Vegas. Locals leaving on a Friday, spending the weekend, driving home Sunday. A pattern consistent enough that the casino's own marketing team is now talking about it publicly. Sit with that for a second. The entertainment capital of the world is losing its own residents to a town 90 minutes down the highway.

[00:10:05]Whether it's a first-time visit from Palmdale or twice a year for 20 years from Colorado.

[00:10:11]>> I'm retired. She's a teacher.

[00:10:14]So, it's just a better fit?

[00:10:15]>> Yeah, it's a better fit. Yeah.

[00:10:17][clears throat] I don't like care for the city too much. The slower pace before a bingo game and the ability to build relationships in Laughlin is appealing. When you go to restaurants and stuff, they're like more They spend more time to to talk to you see how you're doing.

[00:10:33]>> And more people are finding their way to this hidden gem on the Colorado River.

[00:10:37]When you ask them why, the answers are pretty consistent. A retired couple who drove down from Las Vegas, a family on spring break, a Swiss tourist who'd already done Vegas multiple times and wanted something with a different feel.

[00:10:50]One woman summed it up in four words, "It's just a better fit." That line says everything. Vegas stopped fitting them.

[00:10:55]Room rates climbed, resort fees landed on top of that. Parking that used to be free suddenly wasn't. A dinner that should cost $40 cost $100. Each individual change seemed small enough to absorb at the time, but they kept coming year after year, and at some point the weekend just stopped being worth it.

[00:11:10]Laughlin didn't steal these visitors.

[00:11:12]The strip handed them over.

[00:11:14]Part four, the price gap.

[00:11:16]The old-school vibe let people just want the laid-back, flip-flops, cut-off shorts, [music] um, you know, $5 beer, uh, you know, $10.99 pizza and a concert. You know, I can take a water taxi from Aquarius down the river, um, instead of getting in an Uber.

[00:11:36]Let's put some actual numbers on this. A weekend in Laughlin right now, Friday to Sunday. A room at one of the casino properties, the Aquarius, the Edgewater, the Golden Nugget, runs somewhere between $30 and night on a typical weekend. No resort fee on top of that.

[00:11:52]Free parking. The $10.99 pizza Jessica Mock mentioned isn't a throwaway line.

[00:11:57]That's a real price point that exists in Laughlin. Now, do the same weekend on the Las Vegas strip. The average room rate on the strip is $214 a night, according to Kayak. Resort fees at most major strip properties run between $45 and $55 per night before tax, climbing close to $62 with tax at the luxury end. So, that $129 room you thought you were booking, it's $190 or more by the time you check out.

[00:12:23]The average daily room rate in Vegas before resort fees has climbed 34% since 2019, from around $121 to over $162.

[00:12:34]And that's before the resort fee lands on top. Parking, which used to be complimentary across the entire strip, now costs money at most major properties. Cocktails run $25. Here's what that math looks like for a Vegas local planning a weekend away. Two nights in Laughlin, call it $100 in hotel costs, maybe 150 if you're staying somewhere nicer. Add food, drinks, a little gambling money. You're walking away having spent $400 and felt like you got value for it.

[00:13:01]Two nights on the strip at a mid-tier property. The room alone, with resort fees, is pushing $500 before you've eaten a single meal or sat down at a table. Strip visitors now face $25 cocktails and $100 all-you-can-eat restaurants. The gap between those two experiences isn't just financial, it's psychological. There's a specific feeling that comes with spending a lot of money and sensing that the entire operation around you is engineered to extract as much as possible before you leave. That feeling has become the defining characteristic of a strip weekend for a lot of people. Laughlin doesn't give you that feeling. Whether that's by design or just by circumstance, the town never had the resources to engineer that kind of experience. The result is the same. You spend less, you feel better about what you spent, and you go home having actually relaxed. For a Vegas local who already lives 20 minutes from the strip and knows exactly what that experience costs, the math on Laughlin is pretty straightforward.

[00:13:56]Part five, who's actually running Laughlin? Here's something worth paying attention to when you look at who owns the major casino properties in Laughlin right now. It's not some scrappy collection of independent operators holding on to a forgotten river town out of stubbornness. The same corporate names that dominate the Las Vegas strip have a significant presence in Laughlin.

[00:14:16]Caesars Entertainment operates Harrah's Laughlin. The Golden Nugget is there, and Golden Entertainment, a Las Vegas-based company that also operates the Strat on the north end of the strip, owns both the Aquarius and the Edgewater. That last detail is worth sitting with. Golden Entertainment owns properties in Las Vegas and in Laughlin simultaneously. They're operating in both markets at the same time, and right now, one of those markets is growing while the other is losing ground. If you're sitting in a boardroom at Golden Entertainment looking at your monthly visitor numbers, that contrast is impossible to ignore, and Golden Entertainment isn't a small player. This is a company with thousands of employees across Nevada, operating everything from casino resorts to neighborhood gaming taverns under brands like PT's Gold.

[00:14:59]They understand the Nevada gaming market at every level, the high end, the locals market, and the budget end of the spectrum. When a company with that kind of visibility across the whole market decides to double down on Laughlin, that's worth paying attention to. What's interesting is what Golden Entertainment just did. The company recently completed a sale-leaseback deal worth over a billion dollars with VICI Properties, one of the largest gaming real estate investment trusts in the country. VICI already owns the real estate under Caesars Palace and MGM Grand. Under the deal, VICI acquires the real estate of seven Golden Entertainment properties, including the Aquarius and Edgewater in Laughlin, while Golden CEO Blake Sartini takes the operating business private.

[00:15:41]Now, sale-leaseback deals are worth explaining for a second because they matter here. The basic structure is this. A casino company sells the physical real estate to an investment trust, which then leases it back to the operator on a long-term contract. The casino company gets a large cash payment upfront and keeps running the property.

[00:15:58]The investment trust gets a reliable income stream from the lease. It's a financial structure that has reshaped the entire American gaming industry over the last decade, and VICI has been at the center of it. The reason this matters for Laughlin is what it signals about where serious institutional money thinks the market is heading. VICI already owned Harrah's Laughlin through a previous deal with Caesars. Adding the Aquarius and Edgewater gives them ownership of the real estate under three of Laughlin's major casino properties.

[00:16:25]That's a calculated position in a market that someone with a lot of resources and a lot of analysts spent a long time looking at before writing a billion-dollar check. VICI doesn't put that kind of money into a dying market.

[00:16:36]They're not a charity. They're a publicly traded real estate investment trust with obligations to their shareholders. When they look at Laughlin and decide it's worth owning a significant chunk of the real estate there, they're saying something concrete about where they think visitor numbers are going. And given what we've seen from the January data and the trend of Vegas locals making the drive south on weekends, their math doesn't look wrong.

[00:16:58]Here's the deeper irony, though. The financial architecture that VICI represents, sale-leaseback deals, real estate investment trusts owning the ground under casinos, operators running the business on long-term leases with rent obligations baked in, that is the same structure that helped turn the Las Vegas strip into what it is today. When a casino company has a massive lease obligation to a real estate trust, every decision about pricing gets filtered through that obligation. You need to maximize revenue per visitor because you have a landlord to pay. Resort fees aren't an accident. They're a logical output of a financial structure that demands consistent returns. Laughlin is now operating inside that same structure for three of its major properties, which raises a question that nobody in the Laughlin tourism community is asking out loud right now. What happens to the $5 beer and the $10.99 pizza when the lease obligations start demanding more from the business? The honest answer is nobody knows yet. The market in Laughlin is price-sensitive in a way the strip simply isn't. The visitors driving down from Las Vegas are doing it specifically because the math works at Laughlin's current price points. Push those price points too hard, and the math stops working, and the visitors stop coming, and you're left with empty rooms and a long-term lease you still have to pay.

[00:18:12]That tension between the financial pressure to extract more and the market reality that Laughlin's entire value proposition is built on not doing that is something the new ownership structure is going to have to navigate carefully.

[00:18:23]Blake Sartini has been running these properties for years and understands the Laughlin market as well as anyone, but understanding a market and being insulated from investor pressure are two different things. For now, though, none of that tension is visible at the street level. The prices are still low. The vibe is still relaxed. The people making the 90-minute drive from Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon aren't thinking about real estate investment trust structures or lease obligations. They're thinking about what a weekend used to feel like before the strip decided they weren't worth keeping.

[00:18:53]The question is how long Laughlin can stay that way and whether the same money that broke Vegas is patient enough to let it. Part six, what Vegas is actually losing. So, let's go back to the question we opened with. If your own residents are leaving town to gamble and relax somewhere cheaper, what does that tell you about what the strip has become? The easy answer is that it's a pricing problem.

[00:19:15]Resort fees got too high. Parking disappeared. The all-you-can-eat restaurants closed and nothing affordable replaced them.

[00:19:22]Fix the prices, fix the problem. A few strip properties have already started experimenting with that, waving resort fees temporarily, running locals promotions, quietly acknowledging that they pushed it too far. One property on the north end of the strip ran a promotion offering rooms for a dollar a night. A dollar. The catch was a $51 mandatory resort fee on top of it, which tells you everything you need to know about how seriously the strip takes the idea of actually being affordable again.

[00:19:49]But here's what those promotions won't fix, trust. The Strip's spent about 15 years systematically dismantling the implicit agreement it had with its visitors. The agreement was simple. You give us your time and your gambling money, we make the experience worth your while. Affordable rooms, cheap food, a floor you could walk onto without feeling like every square inch was engineered to separate you from your wallet as efficiently as possible. That agreement is gone, and a discount promotion doesn't bring it back. You can waive the resort fee for a weekend, and the person who drove to Laughlin last month will still remember why they drove to last month. You can run a locals campaign, and the couple who used to come twice a year and now doesn't come at all will still remember the moment they looked at their checkout bill and decided it wasn't worth it anymore. That moment doesn't unhappen because you sent them a promotional email. There's a concept in consumer behavior called trust erosion. It's the idea that trust between a brand and its customer base doesn't break all at once. It wears down gradually, one small disappointment at a time, until the customer stops giving the benefit of the doubt entirely. Each resort fee was a small disappointment.

[00:20:52]Each parking charge was a small disappointment. Each cocktail that went from $12 to $16 to $20 to $25 was a small disappointment. Individually, none of them were enough to drive someone away permanently. Collectively, they built a picture of a destination that had stopped caring whether the ordinary visitor felt welcome. The Strip's response to that erosion has largely been to target a different customer entirely. If the middle market visitor is getting priced out, attract the high roller.

[00:21:20]If the family from Phoenix can't afford the room, fill it with a convention attendee on an expense account. If the retiree couple who used to come twice a year stops coming, replace them with a Formula 1 fan who'll pay whatever the algorithm charges for a room that weekend.

[00:21:34]And on paper, that strategy has worked.

[00:21:36]The revenue numbers at MGM and Caesars have been strong. RevPAR, revenue per available room, has climbed steadily.

[00:21:44]The financial press has written glowing profiles of how Las Vegas reinvented itself as a premium destination. What the revenue numbers don't capture is what the Strip is quietly losing in the process. It's definitely more of like kind of just relax, kind of taking all of like the nature, the people.

[00:22:01]Everybody here is, you know, kind of like touristy, but at the same time I feel like a lot of people from Vegas also come here. Seems very relaxed, probably less stressful than Vegas.

[00:22:11]I might have been to Vegas already several times because of her, and I feel like there's a more chilled vibe here.

[00:22:17]It's losing its relationship with the people who live here. 3 million people call the Las Vegas metro area home. For decades, those residents were a built-in customer base. Not the most lucrative visitors, but reliable, local, and deeply connected to the city's identity.

[00:22:32]They brought their out-of-town guests to the Strip. They celebrated birthdays and anniversaries there. They kept the midweek occupancy numbers healthy during the slow periods between conventions and major events. They were the connective tissue between the Strip and the community that surrounds it. That relationship has been quietly dissolving for years. And what makes the Laughlin story significant isn't just the visitor numbers, it's what those numbers represent.

[00:22:57]When your own residents start treating a trip to the Strip the same way they treat a trip to an overpriced tourist trap in another city, something to be endured rather than enjoyed, budgeted for carefully rather than looked forward to, you've lost something that a Formula 1 weekend can't replace. Whether it's a first-time visit from Palmdale or twice a year for 20 years from Colorado.

[00:23:18]>> I'm retired, she's a teacher.

[00:23:21]So this is just a better fit? It's a better fit, yeah. I don't like care for the city too much. The slower pace before a bingo game and the ability to build relationships in Laughlin is appealing. When you go to restaurants and stuff there, a lot more They spend more [music] time to to talk to you see how you're doing. And more people are finding their way to this hidden gem on the Colorado River. What Laughlin offers isn't really about price at the end of the day. Price is the entry point. What it actually offers is the feeling that you are a welcome guest rather than a revenue target. That the bartender has time to talk to you. That the room rate you saw online is the room rate you pay. That a weekend away can still feel like a weekend away and not a financial transaction you need 2 weeks to recover from. That feeling used to live on the Strip. It's what built the Strip in the first place. The original vision of Las Vegas, the one that Don Laughlin himself was operating inside when he ran the 101 Club on the north end of town before he flew his plane south and decided to build something different, was fundamentally democratic.

[00:24:22]Come as you are. Spend what you have.

[00:24:24]Have a good time. The house will make its money, and you'll go home wanting to come back. Somewhere in the decades of consolidation and private equity and sale-leaseback deals and pricing algorithms and resort fees, that vision got buried under the weight of quarterly earnings calls. The Strip didn't set out to price out its own residents. It just followed the financial logic wherever it led, one decision at a time, until it looked up and found itself in a place it never quite intended to be. And in the meantime, 90 minutes south, a town that most of the country has never heard of has been quietly holding on to the thing the Strip let go. The Strip will survive.

[00:25:00]It's too big, too embedded, too important to the Nevada economy to collapse under the weight of its own resort fees. The conventions will keep coming. The high rollers will keep coming. The stadium events will keep selling out. But the Vegas that belonged to everybody, the one that felt like it was built for the regular person as much as the whale, the one where a working family could book a room on a Thursday, eat a decent meal, sit at a blackjack table for a few hours, and walk away feeling like they'd actually gotten something for their money, that Vegas is in Laughlin now, and the drive down is only 90 minutes away from the Strip.