Sublease of lasvegas.com website to LVCVA faces termination
The company that subleases the lasvegas.com website to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to sell hotel rooms and promote the city will terminate that agreement Aug. 2.
Las Vegas-based Remark Media, which manages the lasvegas.com and vegas.com domains, gave its notice of termination on Feb. 3. Termination required a 180-day notification.
The lasvegas.com URL is owned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and leased to Remark, which intends to keep both lasvegas.com and vegas.com as online room reservation portals. Remark acquired vegas.com from Greenspun Corp. in 2015.
Review-Journal Controller John Perdigao said Remark has shown no intent of ending its lease agreement with the Review-Journal, a move that would require a 30-day cancellation notification.
In the time that the LVCVA has partnered with Remark, from November 2012 through January 2017, the LVCVA’s portion of revenue generated at 50 cents per hotel room booking totaled about $640,000.
LVCVA spokesman Jeremy Handel said use of the URL was acquired after the agency’s research determined that consumers preferred a website with a hotel booking engine so they could make a reservation after researching the content. Handel said recent research indicates a booking engine isn’t as important to travelers as it once was.
Prior to using lasvegas.com, the LVCVA offered content on Las Vegas attractions at visitlasvegas.com, which provided links to properties and attractions. The agency expects to go back to operating visitlasvegas.com.
Handel said the LVCVA hasn’t determined the cost of transitioning back to visitlasvegas.com and other specifics about how the site would change.
“From our standpoint, this gives us a chance to step back and do what we do best, which, for us, is providing information about the destination,” Handel said.
Michael Reichartz, president of vegas.com, which is owned by Remark, said online travel booking has changed dramatically since 2012, when vegas.com, then owned by the Greenspun family, first began working with the LVCVA. The growth of mobile applications and a higher number of companies in the online travel agency business have created tougher competition in the industry.
Remark acquired vegas.com because of its specialty in marketing to millennials and because it had an international presence with offices in Brazil and China.
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.
