“Tourism is and will continue to be the largest economic driver for our state,” said Rafael Villanueva, CEO of Travel Nevada. “We applaud the legislature and everyone trying to diversify our economy, and we support that, but at the end of the day, tourism is the driver, and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive.”
Statewide, he said, tourism dollars are down just over 3%. “The thing about Nevada is that we don’t stop looking for ways to open up, to showcase our state,” he said. Policy makers, state offices, unions and locals are pushing and pulling in all directions to boost tourism, and in many cases, it’s working.
“I’ve been in tourism for over 30 years, and the transition I’ve seen happen in Northern Nevada has been incredible,” said Mike Larragueta, president and CEO of Visit Reno Tahoe. “We are performing at a level that has never happened here.”
Before 2020, Reno, Sparks and Tahoe were a “drive” market, Larragueta said. “A place for people just looking to get away [to somewhere nearby].” Now, visitation in Northern Nevada is up nearly 7% year-over-year.
“In the last 14 months, we have not been breaking records—we are shattering records,” Larragueta said. One of those records is room nights. This year, over 340,000 room nights were booked for future business in Reno-Tahoe.
Annual tax revenue was also one of the shattered goals. “We set an all-time record in room tax revenue, almost $500 million in the last fiscal year,” Larragueta said. “The closest year to that since we started tracking numbers was $478 million.”
Larragueta said that 10 years ago the typical Reno tourist looked like an older gaming customer that was hunting for a buffet. “Now, we market more to a younger, outdoorsy type of tourist who wants to stay in Reno but go for a hike, have a day on the Truckee River and kayak,” he said.
They’re also spending more. “Direct visitor spend to the rural communities in Nevada was up about 3.2 percent this year, just over $2 billion,” Villanueva said. “We leverage off the hard work that the LVCVA (Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority) and [Visit Reno Tahoe] do. They bring millions of people to the state every year, and if we can get those visitors to add a day or two to their trip to eat at a restaurant or stay in a local property, go on a hike in a state park, the whole state wins.”
Outdoor recreation is the clear boon in Northern and rural Nevada, with events like Hot August Nights, World Long Drive Competition and Revel Reno bringing younger, sporty people into the cities.
“We’re doubling down on outdoor recreation,” Villanueva said. “I don’t sell a room—I sell an attraction.” Programs like “Get a Little Out There”, long-form videos featuring mountain climber Alex Honnold, have increased visibility to Nevada’s public lands.
“We’re also building two adventure centers, something no state tourism office has ever done,” he said. One is in Boulder City, where tenants take visitors on kayak tours of the Colorado River, bike tours around the city, plane flights across the scenery, sight see the dark sky, and more. Carson City is the other site, which will open in 2027 with similar outdoor entertainment, including access to Lake Tahoe.
“Las Vegas and Reno are our current hubs, and that is great,” Villanueva said. “We want to add Boulder and Carson City as exploration hubs, too, center points for the outdoors.”
This shift in focus is primarily due to pandemic-era travel trends. “We’re finding people are still going outside, maybe even more so now,” he said. “We’re competing with Colorado and Utah, both with beautiful landscapes, who have been marketing like this for decades.”
To Larragueta, it just makes sense to get outside. “So much of our recreation and attraction is natural and outdoors, which it’s either cheap or free,” he said.
The adventure hubs are just the start as more locations receive portions of the Destination Development grant, Villanueva said.
“The legislature was great to give us $1.5 million a year that we then grant to our communities,” he said. “We select a destination, use our staff and some consultants to help develop a strategic plan and involve the local government.” Mesquite was the most recently selected community, receiving $560,000 for a youth sports program.
“Some of the growth in visitation across the state is credited to how aggressive the offices have been bringing in youth and amateur adult sports to the market, so we’re investing in that as well,” Villanueva said.
In Las Vegas, sports are flooding what used to be slow periods of visitation.
“Volleyball, basketball, jiu-jitsu, wrestling and e-sports are just some of what’s here now,” said LVCVA president and CEO Steve Hill. “We had a Pokémon event a few months ago, and there’s real opportunity there. When we have a hole in our schedule in the building, or a light weekday or weekend, we’ve filled it with these things.”
The season of growth is summers, when trade shows are less common, Hill said. “We signed the Nike Women’s Junior Championships for several days in July for 10 years,” he said. “It brings 1,400 teams, and we’ve got basketball courts set up in three different halls for them.”
Summer League is also now a Vegas staple, bringing the entire basketball world “from recruiting to gameplay” to Southern Nevada.
Northern Nevada is taking a similar approach by centering athletics. “We’ll do 150,000 sports group rooms a year here,” Larragueta said.
Reno’s baseball team is to thank for some of that traction, but Reno’s new Mondo indoor track has serious long-term visitor potential. It’s the fourth of its kind in the western U.S. Athletes from middle school to high-profile National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) racetrack events run on Mondo’s tracks, primarily in the winter months.
“If we had a soft period, it’s December through February,” Larragueta said. “The first year we had this track, eight meets produced 12,000 booked nights.”
This past year, over 16,000 rooms were booked. Next year, Reno is looking for 30,000.
“Unlike the other locations, Reno has the infrastructure of the room product, restaurant and bar diversity, and retail opportunity to support the visitor base,” Larragueta said. Nearly $32 million in capital improvements is headed toward Northern Nevada venues to continue the expansion.
In Southern Nevada, the numbers aren’t as exciting. “We are pursuing every angle that we can to get back to where we were in 2024, and really, pre-pandemic,” Hill said. “We’re not limiting our approach.”
Visitation was down 7.5 percent from 2024 to 2025, he said, and this year it’s up “very” marginally. “We were leading the nation in average room rate growth from 2019 to 2024, and since then it has reduced some, year over year,” Hill said.
Over 70 percent of visitors to Las Vegas gamble, regardless of the purpose of their trip, an income for the entire state that continues to hold steady despite the visitor decline.
The marginal tick up in Southern Nevada is instead from meeting and convention visitation.
“Meetings and conventions are up over 10 percent from prior years,” he said. “If the trade shows weren’t up, visitation this year would have been down another percent.”
The Las Vegas Convention Center wrapped up renovations at the start of 2026, which Hill is confident will only continue to grow the meeting attendees.
“This year, we are finally no longer taking individual halls in the convention center offline,” Hill said. “Once we opened up all that space, we needed to grow into it.”
In fact, the growth is already visible: the convention center had 350,000 additional attendees in 2026 over previous years, a number Hill expects to grow.
The convention story is similar in Northern Nevada, where a third of Washoe County’s rooms are select-service, non-smoking, non-gaming chain hotels. This, along with nearly a million square feet of meeting space, allowed for the conference sector to boom in the north, just like in Southern Nevada.
“What brings people to Reno Tahoe depends on a booker’s priorities, but a lot of it comes down to cost,” Larragueta said. “Here, room rates are lower, the cost of a gallon of coffee is still around $50 rather than $150 in other destinations, and we have attractive scenery and events surrounding us—there’s things to do pre-, during or post-meeting, and that’s a huge value component.”
While Hill said money will continue to go to meetings and conventions, a rebound has to come from many sources—youth, amateur and professional sports being some of them.
“There is a tremendous amount to look forward to in Southern Nevada,” said Virginia Valentine, president and CEO of the Nevada Resort Association. “We’ll host the College Football Playoff National Championship in January, the NCAA Men’s Final Four in 2028 and Super Bowl LXIII in 2029. The A’s are scheduled to begin playing in Las Vegas in 2028, and there continues to be interest around the possibility of an NBA expansion team.”
However, unlike in Northern Nevada, outdoor recreation isn’t as much of an option—”there are beautiful things here, but 40 million people can’t visit Red Rock,” Hill said.
The new approach must be more destination-focused, Valentine said. “Major conventions, professional sports, concerts and citywide events are changing the tourism mode,” she said. “Events such as the Super Bowl and Formula 1 aren’t confined to a single property. The entire destination participates. With our stadiums and arenas, resorts are increasingly focused on creating complementary experiences around those events, from viewing parties and entertainment to dining and special activations.”
Michelin Guide also entered the Nevada market, with over 20 restaurants under evaluation and two restaurants in Las Vegas receiving accolades.
Getting creative is in Nevada’s history, Valentine said. “Nevada’s tourism industry has repeatedly demonstrated that it is resilient, innovative and highly adaptive,” she said. “We saw that following 9/11, during the Great Recession and through the pandemic. Each period of adversity forced the industry to rethink how it operates, and many of the innovations that emerged from those periods became permanent improvements. That ability to adapt and reinvent ourselves remains one of Nevada tourism’s greatest strengths.”
On top of new attractions and marketing efforts, innovations in automation may also help close the tourism gap.
“Technology has the potential to smooth the visitor experience,” Hill said. “We’re leaning pretty heavily into AI to streamline things.” Hill pointed to automated check-outs, which reduced customer time from 40 seconds to 15. “Any time you see a line, we’re looking for a solution to that—it’s bad for business,” Hill said.
Larragueta said Northern Nevada is also employing AI in hotels. “We’re looking at an AI concierge, so you walk up to a digital board, and there’s an AI person who can tell you where your meeting is, what room, what time,” he said. “We’re going for informational, a twist, to find efficiencies.”
Valentine said there’s more AI power in gaming now, too. “Technology can analyze large volumes of player activity, identify unusual patterns and help operators respond more quickly,” she said. “It can also help personalize rewards and offers based on a guest’s preferences and the amenities they use. There is also research into how technology may support responsible gaming efforts by identifying patterns associated with potentially risky play, such as escalating wagers or chasing losses, so appropriate responsible gaming tools or interventions can be considered.”
Still, as AI develops, people will remain at the forefront, Valentine said. “Personal interaction and exceptional guest service are at the heart of the resort experience, and there are things our employees deliver that technology simply cannot replace,” she said. “The opportunity is to use AI and digital technology to make the experience more efficient, convenient and personalized while allowing employees to focus more of their time on the guest.”
This adoption hasn’t eliminated roles in Southern Nevada—it’s facilitated job growth. “We’ve added significantly to the staff at LVCVA, which was already a pretty good size,” Hill said. “We’ve brought on four more positions in sales, and I think the resort properties have done the same.”
Automation is also showing up in transit, particularly in Southern Nevada.
Hill said while expansion of the monorail system is in discussion, autonomous services have the greater attention pull. “Waymo has opened now, Robo Taxi is approved, Zoox has been in use for quite some time,” he said. “The kicker is they’re not just transportation, but an attraction in themselves.”
Transportation in Vegas shouldn’t “feel like work,” Hill said. “Getting to and around Las Vegas is going to be fun.”
That also means staying out of the heat, which the underground tunnel system, Vegas Loop, is achieving with both automated and human drivers. “The loop system that Clark County is building is going to be a significant benefit as it starts to branch out,” Hill said. “We’ve got a couple of tunnels running from the convention center and Westgate all the way down to the airport, and when the other loops open, we’ll have huge capacity.”
Getting into Vegas is also on track to be simplified. The Brightline West high-speed train project—which is still in development—is part of that effort. The train would connect California and Nevada with a station in Las Vegas.
“If we can take people off of short, regional flights and put them on a train, that’s a benefit to our airport’s capacity, to the environment, all of those things,” he said. “We’re really trying to help push that forward.”
The resorts are also backing highway development. “I-15 between Las Vegas and Southern California and I-11 toward Arizona need to accommodate growing traffic volumes, particularly during peak travel periods,” Valentine said. “That is why Brightline West represents an important addition to the transportation mix. Giving Southern California visitors another way to reach Las Vegas can help relieve pressure on I-15 while providing travelers with another option.”
Adding more electric vehicle charging stations along the driving routes is becoming increasingly necessary, too, Villanueva said. “There’s still a lot of range anxiety,” he said. “California is our number one market, both in Southern and Northern Nevada, and a growing number of Californians are driving electric vehicles—we need to accommodate that.”
Regardless of ground transportation developments, though, air travel will always be necessary for Nevada’s tourism economy. “I know the LVCVA and [Visit Reno Tahoe] have been extremely aggressive on bringing flights to the Harry Reid International Airport and Reno-Tahoe International Airport,” Villanueva said. A new flight from Nashville to Reno-Tahoe through Southwest is evidence of that work, he said.
How and when Nevada’s tourism economy grows shouldn’t be siloed by industry, Valentine said. It has to be a team effort. “We shouldn’t think about airports, highways, rail and public transit as competing investments,” Valentine said. “A world-class tourism destination needs all of them working together to provide visitors and employees with choices and keep Nevada accessible, competitive and prepared for future growth.”
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