Auld Lang Sigh

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The downsizing of new year's Eve is a logical reaction to that conspicuous, late-second-millennium phenomenon: runaway hype. We've seen years of countdowns, retrospectives and magazine special issues. One entrepreneur went as far as to trademark and license the date 01-01-00 for New Year's gewgaws. No sooner did the milestone begin looming than advertisers began trying to persuade us to, say, associate the Roman numeral 2000--MM--with a certain candy-coated chocolate. Even the Y2K problem has morphed from potential cataclysm to commercial punch line: a Nike ad shows a man going for a jog New Year's morning as the lights flicker out around town, money shoots out of ATMs, people panic in the streets, and an errant missile zooms by overhead. On the one hand, the passing of a thousand years is staggering for a mortal of perhaps 80 years' life-span to apprehend; on the other, its commercialization renders it trivial. No wonder some people are stepping back to mark the occasion in a small-scale, personal way--to take a time-out at this ultimate juncture of time.

Make no mistake, New Year's Eve will be a big deal in places like Vegas, where you can still, if you are so inclined, taste a bottle of 1800 Madeira from Thomas Jefferson's collection at the Rio Suites Hotel and Casino wine party for $2,050 or lease the half-size Eiffel Tower at the Paris for a party of 40 to 50--including chef, butler and host's suite--for a mere $200,000. The stock-option challenged can find Strip accommodations for a (relatively) less exorbitant $400 a night, and those are selling more briskly. But hotel rooms, which the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority predicted would sell out by fall, are still going begging, and major resorts are slashing their inflated rates by hundreds of dollars a night.

"We're not unique," convention-bureau spokesman Rob Powers emphasizes. "The travel industry is seeing this across the board." And reports worldwide bear him out. In Aspen, Colo., tony resorts that would normally have sold out for New Year's week by early November are still unfilled. On Thailand's balmy beaches it's been "the anticlimax of the millennium," says Imtiaz Muqbil, executive editor of Travel Impact Newswire. In London there's a prospect of empty seats greeting the Queen and the Prime Minister as they open the much vaunted Millennium Dome on New Year's Eve, while all six suites in the New York City Palace's $25,000 "Splurge of the Century" are yours for the taking.

There are economic reasons for some of these millennial disappointments. Predictions of widespread, money's-no-object revels were just that--predictions, of an event that hasn't occurred since the airplane was invented, the Crusades gave way to package tours and Dick Clark was soldered together in a top-secret government warehouse. So proprietors aimed for the stratosphere and whiffed. Hotels supersized their room rates; tour operators assessed $1,000 cancellation fees; property owners in New York City and Miami put up their pads for sublet at five-figure rates (few takers, so far); British star chef Marco Pierre White tried and failed to auction off private parties at his restaurants at Sotheby's in London. Even in this boom time, the millennium is, like Yogi Berra's fabled night spot, so crowded nobody goes there.