Airport anxiety

McCarran foresees major strain as new development guarantees more visitors

By Richard N. Velotta / Staff Writer

Passengers walk to a security checkpoint at McCarran International Airport. The airport was on pace to handle more than 44 million travelers in 2005. Photo by Steve Marcus

The city's inventory of hotel rooms is growing at a rate faster than McCarran International Airport's infrastructure can handle.

McCarran officials said this week they'll be challenged to provide enough gates and passenger capacity to accommodate the visitors necessary to fill the thousands of rooms expected to come on line in the next decade.

Randy Walker, director of the Clark County Department of Aviation, said even with a number of creative solutions under study and an ambitious construction schedule ahead, local officials will be hard-pressed to deliver the level of service that has been a trademark of the nation's sixth-busiest airport.

"Our goal," Walker told commissioners, "is to never allow a lack of airport capacity to impede the community's economic health and development."

But demand driven by a new wave of development could provide Walker and the airport with the biggest challenge in its history. Rossi Ralenkotter, president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, and Walker gave back-to-back presentations at this week's Clark County Commission meeting.

Las Vegas is on track to have record visitation in 2005, with 35.5 million recorded in the first 11 months of the year and growth at a pace of 2.8 percent. The city had its best year for visitation in 2004, when 37.4 million people visited -- 5.2 percent ahead of the previous year's pace.

That growth was accomplished with little expansion in the city's hotel room inventory.

But Ralenkotter noted that several projects are on the drawing board that could boost the city's hotel inventory by more than 39,000 rooms from 2006 to 2010. Among the projects on the horizon are Station Casino's Red Rock Resort (850 rooms), Trump International (1,282 rooms), Venetian's Palazzo (3,025), the Cosmopolitan (2,700), Encore at Wynn (1,500), Fontainebleau (4,000), George Clooney's Las Ramblas (4,400), W Las Vegas (3,000) MGM Mirage's Project CityCenter (6,450) and Boyd Gaming's recently announced Echelon Place (5,300).

Ralenkotter noted that other projects that haven't been announced may drive the room count even higher.

History has proved that new resort projects drive new interest in visiting the city. Ralenkotter said that to maintain current occupancy rate levels, there must be 200,000 additional visitors each year for every 1,000 new rooms added.

The LVCVA projected three different growth scenarios through 2015. Under a low-growth scenario, the agency said there would be 180,500 rooms on line by that year, 49 million visitors a year, 95,100 seats a day on airplanes coming into the market based on visitor volume, and 1,307 flights a day.

But with the high-growth scenario, the LVCVA is looking at 210,000 new rooms, 59.2 million visitors a year, 122,100 seats coming into the market on 1,676 flights.

Even under a low-growth scenario, McCarran's resources could be stressed, since not every passenger that comes through the airport stays here. Some are in transit to other destinations, with US Airways and Southwest Airlines using McCarran as a transit point on some of their routes.

In 2004, when 37.4 million were counted as visitors by the LVCVA, McCarran had 41.4 million passengers. McCarran is the second-busiest origination and destination airport in the nation, indicating that a high percentage of passengers that use the airport have Las Vegas as their ultimate destination.

Walker outlined $2.4 billion in capital improvement projects planned at McCarran through 2011 that should ease the infrastructure burden. Key among those are finishing the northwest wing of the D gates, which would increase the number of McCarran gates from 94 to 103 in 2008 and the completion of the new Terminal 3, which would add another 14 gates, in 2011.

The ultimate capacity solution involves the construction of a new airport south of Las Vegas, but Walker noted that it isn't expected to be on line until 2017. Walker has said that the Ivanpah Valley airport would be needed when passenger loads hit around 53 million a year.

It isn't likely that construction at Ivanpah could be speeded up, Walker said, because the environmental impact assessment process is lengthy.

In the meantime, Walker said the airport would do what it can with existing resources and do everything possible to keep visitors, airlines -- and local residents -- happy.

"If we start getting into capacity problems and flight delay issues, some of the airlines will think twice about expanding here because what happens here could disrupt their entire systems," Walker said. "We're a low-yield market for them and they may not think it's worth it. We can't afford to lose any capacity at this point."

Local residents could play a role in an issue that would affect capacity. The "right-turn" controversy being played out in the airspace over Summerlin could result in a capacity loss of 1 million passengers a year if the Federal Aviation Administration does not allow planes to turn to the north after takeoff.

Many Summerlin residents are fighting the flight-path proposal because they say jet noise affects quality of life in their neighborhoods.

Richard N. Velotta covers tourism for In Business Las Vegas and its sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-4061 or by e-mail at velotta@lasvegassun.com.

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