While the statistics on the number of convention and meetings held, visitor volume and convention attendance continue to rise for Las Vegas, the destination is hoping to continue to drive its momentum by marketing its appeal to more international travelers and business professionals.

Overall, visitor volume for the city increased 4.7 percent based on the most recent year to date figures released in August. Convention attendance was up 6.4 percent for the same period and the number of conventions and meetings held also increased by 2.9 percent.

While it’s still too early to flesh out the number of international guests from those statistics, Chris Meyer, CEM CMP and vice president of sales for Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority [LVCVA], says the city is looking to transform itself into a destination known across the globe.

“We’ve begun to talk to every single trade show organizer that uses our facility and we’re capturing international visitation numbers—shows measure everyone that comes onto their show floor—the trend we’re seeing across the show floor is a substantial increase from an international attendance to our city,” he says. “We’ve only started collecting data on those figures since the beginning of this year and we want to have a full year of data in place before we can develop trend lines or sets of figures.”

The international guests are likely coming for business meetings—surrounding hotels are reporting a wide swath of different types of corporate and association business gatherings coming to town and an increase in corporate space usage.

Las Vegas, however, is doing its own legwork to get its name out there.

“This week, internationally, we’re hosting the IMEX convention which has 140 countries here to engage the entire world of business travel—group travel, incentive travel, trade show organizers—everyone is here,” says Meyer. “We’ve got over 4,000 buyers in the destination that are all meeting with the 140 countries that are represented.”

Additionally, the LVCVA just completed its 11th initiative of engaging foreign business guests.

“When talking about international attendance, the LVCVA just completed last Friday our 11th Trade Show Trade Mission where we take show organizers into a country and city and we align them with business opportunities in that destination to attract new clients to their trade show,” says Meyer. “We had 19 trade shows represented at that Trade Show Trade Mission and we went to San Paulo, Brazil. The initial feed back I’m getting from all the organizers was that it was a great trip for them. They’re all going to get business out of it.”

Some trade shows that attended included planners from Hanley Wood’s World of Concrete, the MAGIC show, the JCK Jewelry show and the International Security Conference, among others.