Over the next year and in the past few years, the Las Vegas Strip will have hosted a Super Bowl, a National Basketball Association All-Star Game, the National Football League's draft, and a Formula 1 race. That's in addition to the city now being home to the National Hockey League's Golden Knights and the NFL's Raiders.
The Strip became the place to be for major sports events soon after the Supreme Court opened the door for more states to allow sports betting.
Doing that made Vegas a little less dangerous of a place to bring athletes, or at least no more dangerous than any other state with legal betting.
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While the Strip has become a sports destination, it has also become the place where top-tier artists come to play residencies.
Las Vegas Has Broad Event Appeal
It used to be a sign that you were in the cheesy, nostalgia phase of your career when you took on a Las Vegas residency. That's still true in a few cases (Donny Osmond, we're looking at you), but the city now hosts acts like Adele, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Garth Brooks and pretty much every major electronic dance music figure or star DJ.
Add in the major conventions -- which can bring nearly 200,000 people to Las Vegas, filling up hotels across the Strip and even downtown -- and anything that's happening seems to happen in Las Vegas.
Still, while Caesars Entertainment (CZR) hosts multiple lounges owned by Lisa Vanderpump (of Bravo's "Real Housewives of Beverly Hills"), the city hardly seems like the place for Bravocon, the annual convention devoted to what could be called the Andy Cohen Cinematic Universe.
Nonetheless -- and perhaps in a key sign that Las Vegas is now a city with much broader appeal -- Bravo will bring BravoCon 2023 to three Caesars properties, Caesar's Palace, Harrah's, and the Linq. (Skipping the Caesars property the Flamingo, where rival TV star RuPaul hosts a version of "RuPaul's Drag Race.")
NBCU/TS
The Bravo Shows and Andy Cohen
The Bravo shows, centered on the "Real Housewives" and broken down nightly on Cohen's "Watch What Happens Live," is sort of its own TV world.
That's why it can bring what it calls "Bravoholics and Bravolebrities" together "for a weekend of epic events, unfiltered moments, jaw-dropping revelations, and lifelong connections," the Comcast (CMCSA) television network said in a news release.
Caesars Forum will be the center of the action and Cohen will be there hosting live versions of his show.
“BravoCon is about celebrating our Bravoholics, whose impassioned commitment and loyalty continue to raise the bar on what it means to be a fan,” NBCUniversal's executive vice president, Ellen Stone, said in a statement. “In fact, their invaluable insight and devoted engagement drives us to come back stronger and smarter. You can bet this will be the best BravoCon yet.”
That's a bold promise, but this is only the third BravoCon and it is happening in Las Vegas. And of course, Cohen had to deliver that overplayed, hack line you would expect him to in his comments for the news release.
“Bravoholics, you’ve hit the jackpot. For the first time ever, BravoCon is headed to Las Vegas in 2023. And what happens at BravoCon stays at BravoCon. It really is all happening,” he shared.
The previous BravoCon took place in New York, (where Cohen almost certainly made some sort of "if you can make it here, you'll make it anywhere" in October 2022.
