It’s not often that there is good news on the cost front for meeting and incentive planners, but now is one of those times.
Rio Las Vegas, an off-Strip property with 2,582 guest rooms and more than 200,000 square feet of indoor meeting space, announced June 5 that business groups will no longer be subject to the resort fee typically added to each guest room.
Such fees at Las Vegas resorts typically add $42 to $55 per room per night—and are also subject to the Clark County guest-room tax of 13%, despite being advertised by properties as a fee for amenities found outside the guest room.
While meeting and incentive planners frequently attempt to negotiate away the resort fee for their groups (often by making contractual concessions to the property, such as holding an additional F&B event in house), the move by Rio represents the first time a meetings-focused Las Vegas property has publicly committed to waiving the fee for all incoming groups.
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In the media release announcing the new policy, Rio executives described the move as “a permanent commitment to transparent, competitive group pricing.”
“Planners have told us for years that resort fees are one of the most exhausting parts of contracting in Las Vegas,” said Ashley Lowe, senior vice president of sales for Rio Las Vegas. “The fees complicate budgets and create doubt at exactly the wrong moment. …We initially soft-launched this waiver for 2026 and 2027 groups, and the response was overwhelmingly positive, so we decided to extend it to all years.”
Planner Reaction
Mike Ferreira, owner and CEO of Meetings Made Easy, a meeting broker and planning agency that does a large amount of business in Las Vegas, applauded Rio’s decision.
“I think it is fantastic [for groups] and just great for Las Vegas,” Ferreira said in a video post on LinkedIn. “There are reasons why [groups] steer clear of Vegas, and a lot of times it is the resort fee. Some are so high that when you put it on top of a $250 rate, [the total cost per room] becomes $300 plus-plus.
“In other major cities, the rates are almost always between $200 and $300, except for Nashville because that’s a whole different ballgame,” Ferreira continued. “But now, with Rio waiving resort fees, I applaud [them].”
Ferreira also cited an example of how much a meeting group can save from a waived resort fee.
“I have a group that was just about to sign with Rio for a 2027 event that’s for a few nights and with 250 rooms on peak night,” he said. “I saw the [fee-waiver] announcement and contacted the sales rep to see if we could apply it to [this contract], and they did it. I saved the client $38,000 with that email.”
It remains to be seen whether any other meetings-focused resorts on or near the Las Vegas Strip plan to follow Rio’s lead and make it a policy to waive resort fees for business groups.
