Las Vegas hotel rooms plunge as fans cool on pricey Mayweather-Pacquiao fight

LAS VEGAS – One of the grand proclamations made in the buildup to Saturday’s Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao mega-fight was that it could turn out to be the biggest weekend in Vegas history, with hundreds of thousands of wealthy fans flocking to the Strip and paying premium for everything.

While fight weekend will certainly be a major commercial success by any standard, it may not turn out to be the runaway record event some expected.

The first sign came Thursday evening, when the previously overheated hotel room market plummeted. What once saw even modest rooms at midrange casinos priced exceptionally high now has no floor in sight.

Room rates for this weekend at 113 of the city’s hotels dropped from an average of $558 per night to just $338 per night on Vegas.com, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. A scan of online rates of hotels finds rooms at just over $100 a night. What was once predicted to 99 percent occupancy on the Strip is now softening.

“There has been extreme fallout,” Vanessa Doleshal, business development manager of Vegas.com told the Review-Journal. “Hotels are dropping rates dramatically. They thought the demand was going to be more than what it was.”

Not even the host casino, the MGM Grand, which paid a multimillion-dollar fee to stage the fight in its arena, is sold out. It has rooms available on Hotels.com for $474 a night this weekend. That remains a considerable amount of money but certain room categories have seen their rates drop, the hotel confirmed.

“This sort of fluctuation that we are seeing citywide is not uncommon,” MGM Resorts International spokeswoman Mary Hynes told Yahoo Sports. “Rates will recalibrate. The prices were very high, so the drop would be precipitous.”

Hynes notes that local tourism officials are still projecting citywide occupancy to approach 97 percent with some 300,000-plus visitors in town. While pre-fight perception over huge room prices may have been one thing, reality is reality and it was inevitable.

“We expect to be effectively sold out this weekend and we’re pleased with the rates,” Hynes said. “We do have rooms available, however, and we encourage people to come and enjoy our properties.”

Fight promoters say the fight is still projecting to be a huge success commercially, with domestic pay-per-view buys trending higher than any fight in history. A guaranteed $130 million in international television rights, gate receipts and marketing are all set, co-promoter Bob Arum said.

The secondary ticket market, meanwhile, remains hot, with StubHub.com selling seats this week for a company-record $40,995.

“No individual ticket for any event has ever sold for more,” StubHub.com’s Glenn Lerhman said.

Whether tickets drop also remains to be seen – as of Thursday night, the get-in price is about $2,900, down a couple hundred from the start of the week.

That doesn’t appear to be translating into the expected historic boon for Las Vegas as a whole. While perspective is important, the significant drop in room rates – nearly 40 percent – sent shock waves across town Thursday.

Discussions on and off the record with tourist industry officials and executives involved in the fight production reveal numerous theories for the fall.

One was the decision by promoters to delay the release of tickets to the event until last week. The fight was made back in February, but delays in the signing of the contract and the printing of the tickets until mid-April put everything on hold.

In general, experts say, a host casino such as MGM would have time to sell or trade a number of tickets to other major casinos, who, in turn, could offer them up to top customers, thus extending the reach of the event.

By delaying the ticket release so long, other casinos couldn’t promise anything to anyone and by the time the tickets came through, many major players had other plans or couldn’t make it; the uncertainty kept some people away. While the fight will be sold out, it may mean more locals.

There is a belief that it helped cause an uptick of cancellations this week.

Also being cited is the MGM’s decision to maintain exclusivity in broadcasting the fight on its casino properties – including The Mirage and Mandalay Bay – within Clark County.

Essentially, no other casino can offer a closed-circuit broadcast in its theaters or by its pool, which would accommodate thousands of fans in one swoop. The MGM Properties are expected to have some 50,000 people watching on closed circuit and an additional 16,000 attending live in its Grand Garden Arena.

While this is not a unique deal to this specific fight, by making it more difficult for fans staying at non-MGM properties to come to town, party and soak up the pre-fight atmosphere before watching the action on television, some may be just staying home.

Hynes, of the MGM Grand, notes however that other businesses in Clark County, such as bars and restaurants, can and are offering the fight.

“Yes, it’s our event, it’s our licensed event,” Hynes said. “But it’s not as if no other venue can show it and tickets are still available to our closed-circuit broadcasts.”

However, while smaller bars will show the fight, they will also cater to the 2 million local residents. Plus, space available can’t handle what could easily be 200,000-plus tourists who can’t see it live or on closed circuit.

Finally, there was the pre-fight publicity that often centered on how expensive prices were going to be.

Stories about $1,000-a-night hotel rooms and $100,000 tickets may have scared off all but the wealthiest of fans, who, in turn, made plans to watch the fight at home. There is no way to track the number of fans from, say, Southern California, who just decided not to drive up for the weekend because they assumed it would be too expensive.

What is unquestioned is that there was incredible original interest in coming to Vegas for this weekend.

Hotels.com tracked searches for rooms in Las Vegas for this weekend on Feb. 20-21, the two days after the fight was announced. Hotels.com searches were up 2,630 percent year over year and 1,264 percent week over week in the United States, according to spokesperson Taylor Cole. Global searches on Hotels.com were also up 2,073 percent and 1,013 percent respectively.

“There was huge interest in the very beginning,” Cole told Yahoo Sports.

Perhaps that caused out-of-town fans to scoop up hotel rooms immediately, thus driving the rates up to unreasonable and eventually unsustainable levels. By Thursday, that was over, and as cancellations rolled in, everything began falling.

How low it falls remains to be seen.

Business should still be big in Vegas this fight weekend, real big. It’s just not quite as big as once breathlessly believed.