Deck Stacked in Vegas’ Favor : Can California Compete With City’s New Family Attractions?

Dorothy is still off to see the Wizard, but this time the Yellow Brick Road passes row upon row of clanking slot machines.

Like Munchkins, a gaggle of children surround the pony-tailed actress posing as Dorothy inside the new MGM Grand Hotel casino. Grown-ups snap pictures of the kids and their newfound Land of Oz friends.

Whether it’s swaggering pirates at Treasure Island or Egyptian princesses at the Luxor, similar scenes are being repeated around town as families come to see whether Sin City can live up to its much-promoted reincarnation as a family vacation destination.

Most say they like what they find. And that could spell trouble for Southern California’s $28-billion tourism industry.

“If I was coming from the Midwest, without knowing the difference, there would be no reason to come to Southern California. They will feel they have a complete family experience in Las Vegas,” said Stuart Zanville, a Studio City-based public relations representative and former spokesman for Knott’s Berry Farm who had just returned from a family trip to Las Vegas.

State officials acknowledge that Las Vegas is siphoning away business.

“Tourists are going to go there. There is no question that is going to affect hotel occupancies in Southern California,” said John Poimiroo, director of the California’s Division of Tourism in Sacramento.

A string of new resorts aimed at the family market have broken the uneasy peace that has existed for decades between California and Nevada. The Southland, with its film industry aura and five major theme parks, has traditionally attracted vacationing families. Adults, not kids, went to Las Vegas.

Now Las Vegas’ allure has expanded far beyond the roulette wheels and keno boards. Las Vegas wants everybody.

Families can visit the Emerald City--it’s right behind the Flying Monkey Bar--at Kirk Krikorian’s $1-billion MGM Grand, then head outside to see the hotel’s new theme park.

The Egyptian-themed Luxor Hotel offers an entire floor of interactive, high-technology adventures and the Circus Circus Hotel opened “Grand Slam Canyon,” a roller coaster and water ride emporium underneath an air-conditioned big top made of glass. Pirates battle the Royal Navy every 90 minutes in a free lagoon show outside the Treasure Island resort.

Fueled by a massive publicity wave, the latest hotel openings resulted in a curiosity boom the likes of which Las Vegas has never seen in the holiday season. Traffic became so congested on the Strip that a half-mile taxi trip from Caesars Palace to the Tropicana Hotel took 35 minutes--if you could find a cab.

Las Vegas hotels reported filling more than 90% of their rooms, mostly with families who came to see whether a city known for mobsters and topless showgirls could live up to a freshly minted PG-rated image.

“I think anything new will capture the hearts of kids,” said Lorenzo Williams, a vacationing lawyer from Ft. Pierce, Fla., as he entered the MGM Grand theme park. “I think it has a lot of potential.”

“I’d come here,” said Chris Tou, 15, of Los Altos as he sat cross-legged in the lobby of the 5,005-room MGM hotel--the world’s largest. “For my age, there are more things to do.”

Besides such word-of-mouth endorsements, Time magazine put Las Vegas on its cover last week with an eerie photo of Luxor pyramid and the proclamation, “The New All-American City.”

Against such amusement competition, Southern California has relatively little new to offer. The economy still stinks and many potential visitors are inclined to view the area as gangland instead of Fun Land.

Disneyland plans to opens a new kiddie ride based on its Roger Rabbit character later this month, a modest addition to the $100-million Toontown attraction it opened last year. The only new theme park on the boards is a proposed Legoland in Carlsbad, a landscaped adventure village aimed at small children and their parents, that won’t open until the end of the decade.

Hopes are dimming for a project once widely viewed as the salvation of California tourism: the $3-billion Disneyland Resort project in Anaheim. Walt Disney Co. officials are hinting that their proposed expansion has become too expensive at a time when the company is reeling from a half-billion-dollar drain on profits last fiscal year from its Euro Disney debacle.

All the while, Disney is among the amusement operators paying close attention to Las Vegas.

Judson C. Green, president of Disney’s theme park division, said last month that the casinos are “throwing a lot of money into the ground” by trying to appeal to all ages. Las Vegas, he said, should stick to what it knows best--appealing to gambling grown-ups.

Disneyland Executive Vice President Norman Doerges said the Las Vegas phenomenon “is a very interesting situation. I know it will be something we’re focusing on.”

Because locals make up half or more of the visitors to Southland amusement parks, tourism chief Poimiroo said he thinks most of Las Vegas’ impact will be seen in hotels. It is too early to tell how great the impact will be, he said, because much of the lost crowds will be Canadians and Northwesterners who fly south for the winter that choose Las Vegas this year instead of Southern California.

Hotel operators say they can’t tell whether the bad economy or competition from Las Vegas is to blame for continued sluggish hotel room occupancies. But they say it is inevitable that more rooms will go empty while the hordes head to Nevada instead.

“Anytime something new opens up, they will try it no matter what you say,” said Cheryl Phelps, a regional managing director for the Hyatt chain who manages eight area hotels from Long Beach.

The greatest loss of tourists is not those from other states or countries, but Californians themselves. With 70% of the state’s hotel stays coming from Californians making short vacation trips, they may choose Las Vegas over their home state.

“Customers are fickle. They always want to date the newest girl who comes to school,” said Bill Evans, general manager of the Bahia Hotel on San Diego’s Mission Bay and chairman of that city’s hotel and motel association. “Vegas has a mystique. You can shout in the wind but that doesn’t mean the wind is going to stop.”

The wind may not stop, but most California tourism industry executives expect it will slow. Once the fanfare subsides, the new Las Vegas will have to cope with a number of problems from its newfound success.

For one, casino executives have to figure out how to split parents from their kids long enough so that the adults can hit the blackjack tables. A parent like Zanville, for instance, said he had such a great time in Las Vegas with his wife and his two daughters that he never spent more than pocket change on the slots during his three-day excursion.

Other parents, such as Williams, the Florida lawyer, said they had to sneak out to gamble. “While my little ones are asleep at night, I’m out on the craps tables.”

Wagering subsidizes the town’s low room rates, and attracting parents who are busy shepherding children day and night only fills discounted rooms that would otherwise go to gamblers.

Another problem is that Las Vegas is not about to give up its Sin City image, even if it alienates families.

Sidewalks are littered with tawdry tabloids for strip-tease shows. Some veteran gamblers eye the youthful visitors with contempt, and kids are shooed away by casino guards if they venture too close to the gambling pits.

For those reasons and others, some tourist executives say that they expect Las Vegas may be a neon flash in the pan, that tourists will return to vacation in Southern California once they see how much--or how little--Las Vegas can offer families.

Despite all the ballyhoo about its family attractions, the Las Vegas versions are fairly small. The MGM theme park has seven major rides, compared to two dozen or more at a park like Disneyland.

“I would hope they would see it for what it is,” said Reint Rinders, president of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau. “To portray it as the new Disneyland for kids is a sorry state of affairs.”

Yet another theory is that Las Vegas is simply running scared of competition from the expansion of riverboat and Native American reservation gambling operations, and looking for something new.

“Gaming is no longer unique. They are adjusting to a condition that hasn’t confronted them in the past,” said Charles Ahlers, president of the Anaheim Area Visitor & Convention Bureau. “The family business is of interest to them for the first time because it has to be.”

Still, few in Las Vegas are willing to predict that those problems are insurmountable.

“It’s definitely going to work,” predicted Jeff German, a columnist for the Las Vegas Sun and 15-year newspaperman in the city. “I don’t think this is a fad. It’s a matter of reality.”