At the Exhibitor Academy we held last month in Las Vegas, our partners at ConvExx tipped us off to the status of hotel rooms available for the 2016 SHOT Show. That tip came down to one fine point: hotel rooms are filling up at an unprecedented rate.
Now, I know many of you will read this and say, “Sure this is what they told us last year, but I got my hotel room booked just fine.” Indeed, that was true for all 65,000 attendees of last year’s show. What you didn’t hear about was the number of people who didn’t get rooms or ended up booking far away from the show because they failed to heed our alerts and tried to book too late.
According to Jeff Pressman, President at ConvExx, the days spanning Jan. 18-22, which cover Industry Day at the Range (held the day before the show) and the entirety of SHOT Show, at least two other trade shows of significant size are also taking place in Las Vegas. This means that, just like last year, literally every hotel room available in the Las Vegas metro area will be spoken for during this time.
Learning this bit of information when we did, we took a quick look at the block of rooms NSSF reserves at various hotels in the area and found that two were already completely booked—in June. Even our headquarter hotels, the Venetian and Palazzo, are more than 50 percent booked, double the booking rate for the same time last year. And we still have more than six months to go before the show. Anyone want to take bets on how many of those reservations were made by those who couldn’t get a room last year?
Bottom line here is that we are strongly encouraging everyone planning on attending the 2016 SHOT Show in Las Vegas to book their rooms now. As we do every year, NSSF has reserved blocks of rooms across various hotels near the Sands Expo Center, including rooms at NSSF’s headquarters hotel, the Venetian and Palazzo. The available hotels represent a wide variety of price points so that everyone’s budget and preferences can be accommodated. A full listing of hotels is available at SHOTShow.org, along with links to the Venetian and Palazzo booking page and those to all other currently available hotels NSSF has negotiated discounted prices with via its housing partner onPeak. You’ll also find a link to Frequently Asked Questions, an online contact form for onPeak and travel discount codes for Delta Airlines and Dollar Rent A Car.
If you have any questions, call Venetian/Palazzo at 866-580-1198 (U.S.) or 702-414-4100 and onPeak at 800-388-8104.
Chris Dolnack is Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @ChrisDolnack.