It’s no secret that Canadians enjoy gambling. The country boasts legalized casinos, racetracks, online gaming, sports betting, charitable gaming, and much more. Many of those gamblers also apparently enjoy heading south of the border for some slot play, table games, poker, and a complete gaming vacation.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) recently released international visitor estimates to the city and Canada was once again at the top of the list. The annual list is produced from modeling by Global City Travel via statistics from the firm Tourism Economics to determine where the city’s visitors are coming from.
The figures come as the city continues to see major visitor and casino gaming revenue growth over the last couple years. Las Vegas ended 2023 with more than 40.8 million visitors, the largest number since before the pandemic. That number included 20% year-over-year growth in convention and conference attendance and increased tourism for major events like the first Formula One Las Vegas Grand Prix.
“This was an epic year,” LVCVA CEO Steve Hill said in January.
Canadian gamblers played a big part of that and Sin City saw 1.4 million visitors from north of the border in 2023. That’s a 60.2% increase from the 855,000 Canadian visitors in 2022. That percentage also accounted for 29.9% of all international tourists heading to Las Vegas.
The number of Canadians heading to Las Vegas comes after the country relaxed COVID-19 pandemic restrictions on travel and other parts of life. However, the 2023 numbers are still 4.1% below the prepandemic numbers of 2019.
Mexico landed in the No. 2 spot with 1.1 million visitors, a jump of 9.6% from 989,480 in 2022 but a drop of 3.2% from the prepandemic year of 2022.
As a whole, North Americans visitors accounted for 2.5 million, an increase of 33.5% from 2022. That is still a decline of 3.7% from 2019. The numbers are good as Las Vegas continues to rebound and is at least approaching what the city was seeing before the pandemic.
