New hammer blow for ailing Las Vegas as airport warns visitor numbers have slumped by 100k a DAY
Capacity rates at Sin City's Harry Reid International Airport are forecast to drop dramatically in the second half of 2025, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
The grim outlook is due to a decline in visitors from Canada, along with maintenance issues with the airport's second largest airline, experts said.
They warned the number of inbound passengers will plunge by around 95,000 seats per day for the rest of the year.
The worrying prediction represents a 2.3 percent fall from 2024 numbers, according to the report by Ailevon Pacific Aviation Consulting, which commissioned by the city's tourism board.
The decline is largely being fueled by a sharp 18.5 percent drop-off in traffic from Canada which typically comprises the largest share of international visitors to the Nevada city, per the Las Vegas Review Journal.
The number of Canadian passengers flying to Las Vegas fell by an average of 2,412 per day this year, according to the report.
The loss of Canadian tourists has cancelled out gains from other continents, including a 31.7 percent increase in airline capacity from Asia and a 21.6 percent increase jump from Europe excluding the United Kingdom.
The shock report cemented a steep decline in tourism to Las Vegas, with previous statistics from April showing it was losing upwards of 300,000 visitors per month since the start of 2025.
The loss in tourism was blamed by some on the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in January and his subsequent jibes at Canada.
Trump quickly launched a hostile attack on the country and threatened to make it America's '51st state' if it did not submit to his tariff demands.
With Canadians making up a large part of all tourism to Sin City, Trump's antagonism of its residents may have played a role.
As the downward trend was beginning to snowball in February, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority President and CEO Steve Hill told the Journal that he was hearing from many angry Canadians about the president.
'There's an awful lot of the anecdotal conversation around Canadians being angry and upset about tariffs and talk around annexing the country,' he said.
'We've seen consumer confidence numbers drop pretty significantly over the past couple of months.'
Las Vegas has seen a staggering decline in tourism this year, and a new report found that capacity at its major airport is expected to fall by around 95,000 plane seats a day in the second half of 2025
In May, the World Travel & Tourism Council also reported that in its forecasts for 2025, the US was set to lose $12.5 billion in international visitor spending.
'While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the U.S. government is putting up the 'closed' sign,' Julia Simpson, the council's president and CEO, said in a news release at the time.
Another reason for the recent drop in Las Vegas is due to a maintenance issue with Spirit Airlines, the second busiest carrier at Reid International Airport.
The maintenance issues have grounded 50 planes in Spirit's fleet, which has significantly reduced its capacity, according to Ailevon Pacific Aviation Consulting senior director Joel Van Over.
'They have an issue with their (jet) engines,' Van Over said.
'They have to pull that engine off the plane, fix the cracks, put it back on the plane, and that whole process takes about 300 days.
'So obviously they can't just do a plane a year because it would take them 100 years to get that done.'
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