Gulf War Beats a Full House : Las Vegas: Combat is bad for business at famous hotels and casinos. Trying to attract visitors may appear in bad taste when U.S. troops are risking their lives, ad man says.

LAS VEGAS —  At the Excalibur casino hotel, the giant fantasy castle with enough distractions and entertainment to busy you day and night, guests have been calling the front desk with a rather odd complaint.

Why can’t I get CNN in my room?

Those, of course, are the visitors who bothered to show up here last week. Saddam Hussein may be doing little to deter the U.S. war machine in the Persian Gulf, but he has brought bad luck to the nation’s gambling capital.

“There is a lot of sympathy for the war,” said Blu Clendening, director of publicity at the Aladdin hotel, which cut its work force by 10% last week because of a drop in visitors attributed to the Persian Gulf War. “I know that I am glued to my TV set waiting to see what is happening, and I think the general public is the same way.”

Las Vegas tourism officials confirmed what every bellman and waitress in town had known for days: The recent three-day Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend was a bust. Room occupancy rates dropped 19.2% in motels and 4.9% in hotels compared to the same holiday weekend last year.

“There are two things people here are talking about,” said Cathy Morrison, a Lafayette, Ind., businesswoman playing the slot machines at the Desert Inn, where telephone reservations are off about 10%. “One is the war, and the other is how dead Vegas is.”

An informal survey of 50 hotels and motels by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority showed that as many as 100 guests canceled their weekend reservations at some establishments after the outbreak of war. The number of visitors to the area remained flat at about 138,000, even though volume had been increasing nearly 10% before the war.

“People are scared,” said cab driver Carl Boyd. “They don’t want to fly or go out. Those that are here had already booked and had no choice.”

On top of it all, Sin City seems to have developed an uncharacteristic case of the guilts. For the second week in a row, tourism officials have suspended all television advertising--to the tune of $50,000 a week--because of worries that it may offend viewers.

“It is a wild card in the deck not to have TV advertising right now,” said Rob Powers of R & R Advertising, which handles advertising for the visitors authority. “But we thought it was not the right thing to run television spots about fun and entertainment in Las Vegas when they might be juxtaposed with allied casualties in the Gulf.”

The guilt factor is apparently being taken seriously everywhere. American flags are popping up from casino entrances to airport parking garages. Electronic marquees salute “our brave men and women preserving freedom” between pitches for low room rates and dinner specials.

Casinos and hotels have tried smoothing the transition for guests from the battle front to the gambling table by tuning casino and bar televisions to CNN, although some gamblers complained the volume was never turned on. Even the mammoth twinkling betting wall at the Race and Sports Book at the posh Mirage hotel and casino has devoted one of its six big-screen televisions to war coverage.

At slot machines and gambling tables, in elevators and restaurants, talk has been of the war. “There is no escaping it,” said Cam Usher, general manager of sales for the visitors authority. “There are very few places you can go to get away from the news.”

Dolores and Donald Barth, grandparents from North Bergen, N. J., who were given a vacation in Las Vegas as a Christmas present from their children, said they thought twice about making the journey once the war began, but decided to treat themselves anyway. The Barths’ 11-year-old granddaughter died recently after a long illness, and they said they needed to get away.

“After all that, nothing seemed to matter,” Dolores Barth said. “I feel bad the war is here, but I couldn’t do anything to stop it. Vegas is what everybody said it would be. It is a gambler’s paradise.”

As Barth spoke, the tray beneath her slot machine flooded with quarters.

It is that kind of good fortune, coupled with expectations of a good Super Bowl weekend--traditionally one of the busiest of the year--that has tourism officials cautioning against overreacting to the recent bad news.

“The networks are back to regular programs and commercials,” said Steve Schiffman, publicity manager for the Desert Inn. “This war in the gulf is a miniseries. . . . Things are going to pick up again.”