Ronnie and Lisa Littlejohn enjoy champagne after their marriage during this century’s last sequential wedding date of 12/13/14 on the High Roller on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2014, in the Linq Promenade.
For more than 70 years, the little white chapels that dot Las Vegas Boulevard have been as inseparable from the city’s identity as the towering casinos that line the Strip. What started with easy places for a quick marriage have evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry, which at its peak played host to one out of every 20 weddings in the United States.
Source: Conor Shine, Las Vegas Sun
But wedding bells have been ringing less often in Las Vegas recently — nearly 47,000 fewer couples were married here in 2014 than were a decade ago, even though record numbers of tourists have flocked to the city. In 2004, the number of weddings performed in Clark County peaked at 128,000. Last year, only 81,000 took place.
“Weddings have always been there, but maybe taken a little for granted,” said Ann Parsons, marketing director for Vegas Weddings, which operates a downtown Las Vegas chapel. “There really hasn’t been much advertising for matrimonial tourism.”
The decline has been widely recognized within the local wedding industry, as increasing competition for fewer nuptials forced many chapels out of business, but the threat hadn’t received broader attention until Clark County Clerk Lynn Goya took office in January and became alarmed.
“I looked at 30 years of data,” said Goya, who oversees the county’s marriage license bureau. “When I saw that there was such a decline I said, ‘We need to do something.'”
Joni Moss, a wedding planner and founder of Nevada Wedding Association, said the city isn’t in danger of losing its crown as the world’s top wedding destination, but it is facing increased competition from places like Hawaii and the Caribbean.
“People want their weddings to be unique,” said Moss. “They want to get married outdoors at Red Rock Canyon, in a helicopter or on the High Roller. Stuff you’ll only find in Vegas. Where else can you get married by a volcano?”