New Town Square and other high end malls are making Vegas a shopping mecca.

Shopping is right up there with all the usual reasons clients visit Las Vegas -- gaming, nightlife, shows, sights, dining out and attending a convention. High-end shopping, especially, is another enticement that can help you can increase your Las Vegas sales, or at least enhance your clients’ vacation experience.

“Visitors, on average, spend more on shopping than on shows and sightseeing combined,” says Erika Pope, spokeswoman for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA). Indeed, the debut in November of the town’s latest upscale mall, the 117-acre Town Square, has got some in the travel trade buzzing. Will clients drop dollars to visit yet another Vegas fashion outpost, this one at the far southern end of the Strip? The answer is probably yes.

The ground-level corridors of the town’s more elegant hotel-casinos have long offered glitzy stores giving guests the chance to buy everything from jewelry and formalwear to sportswear and artifacts. But the experience was, until several years ago, low-key. The browsing ended at the door leading to the hotel’s pool or to the Strip beyond.

Identifying and targeting this limitation, Vegas’ moguls went for the high-return jugular. They sent not just high-end shopping, but high-end browsing, into the atmospheric stratosphere, so to speak. With the help of well-paid retail production designers, they installed expansive, themed shopping “lands,” mainly on-property, such as the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace and the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood. Free-standing malls also began appearing.

Such radically self-enclosed environments offer shoppers the delightful ambiance of, say, the cobblestone streets of Paris; the crowded byways of Venice; the marbled esplanades of ancient Rome; and even the fashionista streets of Hollywood. Fake blue sky, with ersatz stratocumulus painted against it, became standard at these retail venues.

These venues also offer entertainment, which actually has acquired the name “shop-u-tainment.” Shopping here is no longer just about seeking a blouse or a pair of shoes. Such an errand is something of a sidelight as shoppers pass into a benign twilight zone of diversion. While shopping, they can see opera singers perform arias in St. Mark’s Square in The Venetian; watch street mimes walk about in Paris; see buff Roman sentries stand stoutly at attention on the Appian Way in Caesar’s Palace; and watch fashion models on a catwalk as they sip a beer in a sidewalk cafe.

The retail business in Las Vegas counts at least 50,000 people per day cruising malls and taking in their diversions. Local officials routinely quote annual sales at Strip shopping venues -the fantastic promenades within the hotels ranging anywhere from 500,000 to nearly two million square feet – to be in the vicinity of $1,000 per square foot (the national average is $392). So it should come as no surprise that people put shopping high on their lists of the reasons they want to visit Las Vegas.

Town Square Mall is the latest venue to enter this race. Sporting a million-and-a-half-square feet of retail, it opened in November. It’s actually the eighth such mall to grace the Strip - South Las Vegas Blvd., running roughly between Spring Mountain Rd. to the north and Warm Springs Road to the south. Two other well-known venues, the Fashion Show Mall, the only mall in town larger than Town Square, and Las Vegas Premium Outlets, abutting the I-15 freeway, lie just north of the Strip. In fact, the Las Vegas Premium Outlets have just grown from 120 to 150 stores.

Like its brethren, and despite all the chain stores making up its tenants, Town Square’s own “shop-u-tainment” does not disappoint. It’s a new “lifestyle center” that sweeps the imagination of browsers with what its promoters term “Main Street appeal” - as in Main Street Barcelona, Main Street Milan, Main Street Casablanca, Main Street San Diego.

Town Square features a mélange of architectural motifs. Its designers basically turned inside out a Beverly Grove, Los Angeles, approach to shopping in a place where, as one inches south of the Strip (and on to California), land is still widely available and relatively inexpensive. So the theme here is of an expansive historic metropolis that has aged gracefully over time.

Shoppers discover a veritable town of 150-plus shops, more than a dozen restaurants, several entertainment venues and more than 70 façade types. Rather than finding a pedestrian promenade, visitors experience real streets – even with parking meters ($1 per hour - and modest, second-story, loft-like offices (one of which will be occupied by the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce).

“We’re mixing it up with a little contemporary, a little modern, some classical, a lot of Old World,” says Mike Wethington, the project’s general manager. “Town Square is designed as a lifestyle center, a place to go whether you’re alone, with friends or family. You can find a degree of comfort and familiarity here mixed in with some really interesting designs. What you won’t find here are traditional department stores.”

Stores coming to Town Square include: Old Navy, Abercrombie & Fitch, Tommy Bahama, Fossil, Godiva, Steve Madden, Swarovski, Chico’s, Skechers, Soma, Solstice, Victoria’s Secret and H&M (its flagship store). The lengthy list of tenants also includes Borders, Whole Foods, the Strip’s second Apple Store and a 90,000-square-foot showroom for Robb & Stuckey Interiors. Diners will find Tommy Bahama’s Tropical Café intriguing. They can shop for shirts and then sip Mai Tais on the patio overlooking the Park.

That’s right, there’s even a park, a 13,000-square-foot patch that is the mall’s centerpiece. It features a delightful labyrinth, a 25-foot high tree house, pop-up fountains, a Tom Sawyer house, a mini-replica of the shopping center itself, storytelling stages (occasionally staffed by storytelling sages) and plenty of park benches for tired parents and grandparents.

“We’re dedicated to the concept that it’s a lifestyle center, not a mall,” says Wethington. That means there’s a 91,000-square-foot, 4,000-seat, 18-screen movie theater operated by Rave Motion Pictures of Dallas. Flanking the corridors leading to the Cineplex are bars, restaurants and casual cafes. Visitors can hit The Yard House for 250 types of draft beer; The Grape for 150 varieties of wine, available by the glass, bottle, or case; or head into a Brazilian steakhouse called Texas de Brazil.

For all its high-production values, the marketers of Town Square place great stock in its location at the south end of the Strip, conveniently next-door to Fry’s Electronics and just across the way from the Belz Premium Outlet Center. That’s where name-brand and designer items get the red tag. It’s good to know that for at least for the foreseeable future, Town Square will be fully retail and bargain-boutique-free.

The mall’s convenient location near McCarran Airport would also seem to make it a last-chance stop for visitors seeking to shop before heading back home. In particular, Town Square is close to McCarran’s centralized off-site car rental facility, which opened this summer just west of the airport. Here, visitors can check bags and make arrangements to board shuttle services to the airport. On Town Square’s part, a concierge office at the new mall will arrange transportation for guests, assist with reservations and offer a variety of other services.

Funjet, a leading wholesaler packaging to Las Vegas, has developed a number of packages that include shopping . “Agents can add on features like shopping excursions as easily as show tickets,” says Andrea Kozek, a Funjet spokeswoman. “The point is for agents to help clients build their vacation into the exact experience they want, rather than settle for something that is somehow lacking. These features have a standard 10 percent commission at least, to make it easy for agents to determine the incentive they’re receiving for each item booked.”

Funjet offers a Fashions Outlet Mall option, combining airfare, nights at MGM Mirage’s resort properties and discount coupons. For a $20 fee on top of air and room, you can add roundtrip shuttle service to the Fashions Outlet Mall and a Fashions Outlet VIP Gold Savings Card worth $900 in added discounts and special offers (Shop & Shuttle). For $60 on top of air and a stay at the MGM Grand, your clients receive a facial and hand care treatment from Origins, a $25 gift certificate to a Desert Passage (Mall) health and beauty store, and $15 toward a meal from a Desert Passage restaurant (Shop & Beauty). For more information, call 888-558-6654.

A leading website for shopping in Las Vegas with a special agent booking engine can be found at www.lasvegasandmore.com/shopping. Here you will find discount packages available directly from malls such as the Miracle Mile Shops, Fashion Outlets, Fashion Show, the Forum Shops, The Grand Canal Shoppes and Las Vegas Premium Outlets. To book by phone, call 888-467-8678.