A river runs through them: Laughlin, Mesquite strive to survive

It’s a tale of two Southern Nevada cities and a river runs through them.

Both have encountered struggles attracting tourists over the years for different reasons and both have the common bond of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority performing their tourism marketing plans as somewhat of a big brother.

Both suffered through 9-11, the Great Recession and the COVID years. Both saw major hotel casinos boarded up and closed and both rely on occasionally fickle markets. Both have daytime temperatures generally hotter than Las Vegas.

Laughlin, where the Colorado River flows through magnificently after being waylaid by Hoover and Davis dams, is a speck on the map where Nevada, Arizona and California converge. The town’s best years were in the mid-to-late 1990s when Laughlin had just over 11,000 hotel rooms, visitation teetered around 4.5 million people a year with a high-water mark of 4.8 million in 1994.

Before additional hotels were built, occupancy hit an unheard of 97.2 percent in 1988 and gaming win revenue peaked at $631.2 million in 2007, just before the Great Recession kicked in.

Tourism statistics for 2023 show Laughlin having 1.3 million visitors to its 8,692 hotel rooms, but a room occupancy rate of 50.4 percent. Room rates have risen from an average $33 a night in 2004 to $61 a night today and casinos won $511.1 million in 2023.

In Mesquite, where the Virgin River trickles to a muddy mess on its way to Lake Mead, but irrigates a string of championship golf courses along the way, the room inventory has cratered from more than 3,000 in 1999 to 1,650 today.

Perched on the Arizona-Nevada border on the way to Utah on Interstate 15, Mesquite has blossomed into a growing retirement community with its own municipality.

While there were 1.7 million visitors in 1999, the annual average is just under 1 million today. Occupancy rates have hovered between the high 70s and low 80s and the average daily room rate has grown from around $33 in 2001 to $75 today.

The LVCVA didn’t monitor Mesquite visitation numbers during the COVID years, but gaming win rode the post-COVID nationwide wave to new heights. The town’s best gaming year was 2023 when the Nevada Gaming Control Board reported win at $183.6 million. Casinos there won less than $100 million until 2001 and just before the Great Recession, in 2007, it hit $163.7 million — around the level the Strip makes on a good week.

Fletch Brunelle, the LVCVA’s vice president of marketing, said Laughlin collects around $3 million a year and Mesquite, $1.3 million a year in hotel room tax collections.

The LVCVA turns that around by investing roughly 75 percent of the proceeds to advertising, marketing and sales, and 25 percent to sponsoring special events.

How do Laughlin and Mesquite survive? What’s in store for them? Here are their stories.

In Laughlin, entertainment is the main attraction

Golf, youth sports, special events drive tourism in Mesquite