Tourists in Las Vegas are boycotting helicopter tours following the canyon crash that killed five people.

During a normal eight-hour shift on the Las Vegas Strip, Michael Denicoli usually sells enough helicopter tours of the Grand Canyon and Sin City to fill two or three choppers.

But tourists who walk by his booth are skipping the splurge of a few hundred dollars for a bird's eye view of the Hoover Dam and other sites.

"I have advertisements of helicopters, and they look at it like as if it says 'The plague'," Mr Denicoli said as he worked at an Adventures International stand on the Strip opposite the CityCenter casino complex at the start of a busy tourist weekend. "It went from being slow to being beyond slow."

Mr Denicoli said he removed countertop brochures for Sundance Helicopters - the company that operated the helicopter that crashed on Wednesday evening in a remote canyon 12 miles east of Las Vegas - not wanting potential customers to link the operator to the stand.

But few, if any, among hundreds of tourists who passed the stand during any given hour were stopping.

Sundance and other helicopter operators have tried to move forward from the crash with normal flight schedules as passengers with tickets have called to ask about safety.

Meanwhile, those who have taken rides before have been openly thinking about whether they would do so again as they post pictures of their excursions on Facebook and Twitter.

"It was beautiful, but it was pretty frightening at some points," said Liz Beltran, 23, of Norwalk, Connecticut, who posed for a picture at the bottom of the Grand Canyon after taking a £320 helicopter tour nearly a year ago.

"I really loved it and I told all my friends to do it, but definitely now after this, I don't think I'm going to be recommending it too much any more."

US government investigators are still piecing together what happened in the crash that killed 31-year-old pilot Landon Nield, a Kansas couple celebrating their wedding anniversary and another couple from New Delhi, India. The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to issue a preliminary report on the crash in two weeks.

Sundance resumed normal operations on Friday after voluntarily suspending them and planned to give refunds if customers asked, spokeswoman Sabrina LiPiccolo said.

Aerial sightseeing is big business in Las Vegas, with four operators at McCarran International Airport averaging more than 1,500 passengers per day combined so far this year at ticket prices often starting above £128. The flights let tourists see some of the region's most iconic sites from vantage points they could not get from the ground.

Many tourists, especially international visitors, are not always in Las Vegas for the gambling. Couples often board the flights for romantic excursions, as do tourists looking to fulfil a list of top American destinations they want to see in their lifetime.

Nigel Turner, owner of Heli USA Airways, which runs tours out of McCarran, said he's had no cancellations but has spent lots of time since the crash reassuring customers that his flights were safe.

"I was on the phone at three o'clock this morning talking to my big accounts in Europe, just reassuring them about safety," he said, noting that 60% of his business came from international travellers. "They're our partners and they've got to trust us, and they do."

There are hundreds of similar companies nationwide, offering aerial tours of places like Mount Rushmore, New York City and the Gulf of Mexico.

"It's a very big industry and a very professional industry," said Mr Turner, who is investing £18 million in seven new helicopters to add to his fleet.

"Fifteen, 20 years ago we did have cowboys then. That's when the crashes happened. Now, it's a very regulated industry by the owners. These people who own these companies are not playing chump change here."

Mike Brennan, a 22-year-old New Yorker who took a Grand Canyon helicopter tour with his brother three years ago, said the crash would not make him hesitate to fly in helicopters again, because people who fly understood there were inherent risks before taking off.

"It's sort of similar to going to an amusement park," he said. "There's always like a danger where things happen on those rides occasionally. But it's like you hear about it but you don't ever think it'll happen to you."