Over at the Sequential Tart website, Katherine Keller makes her case that the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego should become the annual Comic-Con International in Las Vegas. I don't think this is very likely. For thirty-some-odd years, there's been talk of the convention moving to another city but it's never really come from anyone who would actually be involved in making that happen.
In any case, Katherine concludes her essay by saying, "Based on these facts, name me one reason it should not be Las Vegas." Since I know Vegas pretty well, I'd like to give her a few, starting with the weather. The average July temperature in San Diego is 84 degrees and it's usually 5-10 degrees less around the ocean where the convention center is located. The average July temperature in Las Vegas is 106. How's that for one reason?
I would also question a lot of those facts or at least their relevance. Yes, McCarran Airport in Vegas can handle a lot more traffic than San Diego. It has to handle a lot more and it isn't doing that good a job of it. They've been adding new terminals and gates at a feverish rate and so far, they haven't been able to gain on the steadily-increasing visitor traffic. Deutsch Bank recently released a projection of tourist volume that does not seem to be available online except behind one subscription firewall…but trust me. They calculated the number of planned hotel rooms in Vegas (42,000 more in the next five years) and said that McCarran will fall even farther behind. In fact, the hotels have been counting on some (not all) of those problems being alleviated by a new $4 billion airport planned for Ivanpah Valley, which is thirty miles outside Las Vegas. But the most optimistic date for its completion is 2017.
If we're going to compare the two destinations in terms of how easy they are to get to, I think San Diego wins. Most San Diego attendees are coming from portions of California to the north. Many go by train and they can't get to Vegas that way since there's no train service to Las Vegas. There's also very little bus service. Most drive…and the drive to Vegas, at least from Southern California, is a mess these days with I-15 being intermittently closed or limited for construction. One of the appeals of Comic-Con is how many attendees come from Hollywood…and it takes twice as long to drive to Vegas from Los Angeles as it does to drive to San Diego from Los Angeles.
Ms. Keller touts the wonders of the Vegas monorail system as being able to deliver people easily to the convention center. Well, it is if you're near one of the seven places it stops. It's useless for most hotels in Vegas and it's even useless for the seven locations it serves when it's out of commission, which is a large percentage of the time. It may become totally useless if it closes, which it may do because it's losing a fortune.
Yes, Vegas has more convention center space. It's also vast, cold and impersonal. People complain about having to walk too much in San Diego. These are all people who've never attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. More space is not a good thing if it fragments the event to the point you never get from one area to another.
The C.E.S. is worth mentioning because it's the biggest convention in that city and at 150,000 attendees, it's as big as the Comic-Con will be in a few years if Comic-Con doesn't do something silly like move to Vegas. It's no easier or cheaper to get a hotel room in Vegas during C.E.S. than it is to get one in San Diego during Comic-Con. Just to give you an example, I went online and checked out the Riviera Hotel in Vegas, which is one of the crummier places one might stay there. During normal, non-convention times, a room at the Riv is $69 a night. For the dates of next January's C.E.S., which is not even on a weekend, they're already asking $269 a night. The Bellagio, which is a very nice hotel, is asking $499 a night and the cheapest room at the Venetian is $549. If it were a weekend, those rates would certainly be doubled. These prices should tell you something about demand and availability. During C.E.S., all the hotels either sell out months in advance or charge like that…or both.
And let's also note that the C.E.S. is in January. They're smart enough not to try to get people to go to Las Vegas in the Summer. When they used to have two Consumer Electronics Shows per year, they had the Winter one in Vegas and the Summer one in Chicago.
Lastly: The convention, when it's in San Diego, is almost the only game in town. Comic-Con would not be that big a deal in Las Vegas. No one convention is and the hotels in Vegas were not built to serve the convention center, whereas the main ones we stay at in San Diego were. The Comic-Con actually changed the face of convention-going in San Diego and is deemed important by the locals there. Vegas wouldn't care. We'd just be one of many conventions that week or that month, and the esteem in which we were held, and the "clout" of the convention organizers would have everything to do with how much money we spent while we were there. Somehow, I don't think comic book people would spend anywhere near as much as the people who attend the C.E.S. in Vegas, most of whom seem to be Sony and Panasonic execs on unlimited expense accounts. I also don't know what exhibitor space at a Vegas convention would cost but I'll bet it would be a lot more expensive than what Sergio Aragonés and Stan Sakai pay for their tables in San Diego.
So there's a whole bunch of reasons and I'll bet if I spent another twenty minutes on it, I'd come up with twenty more…and I say this as someone who likes Las Vegas, who goes there often. But I go there for totally different reasons than I go to the Comic-Con in San Diego. Vegas is designed to lure you to the showrooms and Blackjack tables when you're not at your convention. At Comic-Con, I don't want or need all that enticement. When we go to Comic-Con in San Diego, we're the show and we bring our own entertainment. Oh, and I just remembered a biggie: At Comic-Con, they don't expect you to go pay good money to see Wayne Newton or Carrot Top. There's two more reasons.