Las Vegas Hotel Guide

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Back to Las VegasLas Vegas Hotel Guide

If there's one thing Vegas has, it's hotels. Big hotels. And lots of them. You'll find 9 of the 10 largest hotels in the United States -- 8 of the top 10 in the world -- right here. And you'll find a whole lot of rooms: 140,000 rooms, give or take, as of this writing. Every 5 minutes, or so it seems, someone is putting up a new giant hotel or adding another 1,000 rooms to an existing one. So finding a place to stay in Vegas should be the least of your worries.

Or should it?

When a convention, a fight, or some other big event is happening -- and these things are always happening -- darn near all of those 140,000 rooms are going to be sold out. (Over the course of a regular year -- one not affected by the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks -- the occupancy rate for hotel rooms in Las Vegas runs at about 90%.) A last-minute Vegas vacation can turn into a housing nightmare. If possible, plan in advance so that you can have your choice: Ancient Egypt or Ancient Rome? New York or New Orleans? Strip or Downtown? Luxury or economy? Vegas has all that and way too much more.

The bottom line is that with a few, mostly subtle differences, a hotel room is a hotel room is a hotel room. After you factor in location, price, and whether you have a pirate-loving kid, there isn't that much difference between rooms, except for perhaps size and the quality of their surprisingly similar furnishings.

Hotel prices in Vegas are anything but fixed, so you will notice wild price ranges. The same room can routinely go for anywhere from $60 to $250, depending on demand, and even that range is negotiable if it's a slow time. So use our price categories with a grain of salt, and don't rule out a hotel just because it's listed as "Very Expensive" -- on any given day, you might get a great deal on a room in a pricey hotel. Just look online or call and ask.

Yes, if you pay more, you'll probably (but not certainly) get a "nicer" establishment and clientele to match (perhaps not so many loud drunks in the elevators). On the other hand, if a convention is in town, the drunks will be there no matter how upscale the hotel -- they'll just be wearing business suits and/or funny hats. And frankly, the big hotels, no matter how fine, have mass-produced rooms; at 3,000 rooms or more, they are the equivalent of '60s tract housing. Consequently, even in the nicest hotels, you can (and probably will) encounter plumbing noises, overhear conversations from other rooms, or be woken by the maids as they knock on the doors next to yours that don't have the DO NOT DISTURB sign up.

Coming Attractions

Part of the reason that we patiently tell people they haven't really been to Vegas, even if they have, is because if they haven't been by in the last, oh, week -- okay, let's say 2 or 3 years -- they might find several surprises awaiting them on the Strip. And if it's been more than a decade, well, forget it. All the classic old hotels are either gone (Sands, Hacienda) or renovated virtually beyond recognition (Caesars, The Flamingo). In their place rise bigger and better and trendier resort hotels, changing the landscape and altering the welcome that Vegas visitors receive.

The new era of Vegas hotels was ushered in by The Mirage, and since then, everyone has been trying to up the ante. The year 1997 began with the opening of New York-New York, which set yet another level of stupendous excess that remained unmatched for, oh, at least 18 months.

The fall of 1998 saw the official beginning of the new era of Vegas luxury resorts (many with themes), with the opening of the opulent Bellagio, followed by Mandalay Bay and Four Seasons. And then these took a backseat (sort of) to The Venetian, which combines the jaw-dropping detail and extravagance of New York-New York (complete with canals and gondolas) with the luxury of Bellagio. Could anything top it? Possibly -- hot on its heels was Paris, themed as you can imagine, and just a few months later, the new and improved Aladdin, with its desert-fantasy decor.

The first half of this decade was less about new stuff and more about old stuff getting bigger and/or better. Sure, Caesars opened its Roman Coliseum replica, built just to house Céline Dion's new show, but other than that, no grand new hotels or major expansions arrived, unless you count (and we sure do) the arrival of a true luxury resort, the Ritz-Carlton, Lake Las Vegas, over in nearby Henderson. One old hotel, The Maxim, was reborn as a business-swank Westin, complete with their trademark "Heavenly Beds." The rest of the action was all about expansions: The Venetian added 1,000 rooms, a new pool, a fancy restaurant, and more in the new Venezia Tower; Mandalay Bay added more than 1,000 rooms and other goodies in a facility they call THEhotel; Bellagio joined the fray with more than 900 new rooms and a swank new spa in a new tower; and Caesars Palace added a new 700-room tower to its empire.

The year 2005 kicked off what will be an unprecedented wave of development, with the arrival of Wynn Las Vegas, the latest hotel concept from Steve Wynn, the man behind Mirage Corp., at a mere cost of $2.7 billion. In 2006, we saw the addition of two new joints, South Coast and Red Rock Resort, designed to lure tourists away from the busy Strip, and two top-to-bottom overhauls, with the creaky old San Remo going pneumatic as the Hooters Casino Hotel (no, really) and the relatively new Aladdin getting an extreme makeover to become Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino (no, really, again).

But that won't be the end of it, not hardly. In 2007, we'll see the debut of yet another expansion to The Venetian, a 3,000-room resort and casino called Palazzo, seeking to continue the parent hotel's Italian aesthetic, and an inaugural foray for The Donald in Vegas with Trump International, the first of two 1,200-unit condo/hotel towers going up behind the Frontier. Things will really ratchet up in 2008, with the birth of Wynn's second baby, Encore, a $1.7-billion, 2,000-room hotel and casino, complete with its own indoor pool with a retractable roof. That's also the year four brand names will enter the Vegas market for the first time: the new W Hotel and Residences, just off the Strip; The Conrad Majestic, a 400-room hotel/condo project going in just north of Wynn Las Vegas; a new Loew's at Lake Las Vegas; and a Hyatt hotel as part of the $1.8-billion casino and entertainment complex Cosmopolitan, now under construction just south of Bellagio, which will also include condos. Speaking of condos . . . that seems to be the property development trend right now, so if you haven't been to Vegas in a while, and you wonder what that, and that over there, and also that, really big tall tower is, it's more than likely a condo building.

But the biggest of the big new developments will come at the end of this decade, with the 2010 arrivals of Project CityCenter, a $7-billion (yes, you read that right) complex of hotels, condos, casinos, shopping, and entertainment spread across 66 acres just north of Monte Carlo, and Echelon Place, a 63-acre multihotel development that will replace The Stardust.

Other plans are in various stages of development: replacing The Frontier with a jazz-themed Montreaux resort (complete with giant Ferris wheel, although what that has to do with jazz is anyone's guess) and tearing down or completely renovating The Imperial Palace (closing in 2007), the Tropicana, The Riviera, and possibly Bally's. Of course, another economic downturn of even the slightest size could prevent all of it. Stay tuned.

Reservations Services

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority runs a room-reservations hot line (tel. 877/VISIT-LV or 702/892-0711; www.visitlasvegas.com) that can be helpful. They can apprise you of room availability, quote rates, contact a hotel for you, and tell you when major conventions will be in town.

Who Kept the Kids Out?

Some hotels -- notably Bellagio, which started the practice, and Wynn Las Vegas -- ban children who are not staying on-site from stepping foot on the hotel premises and ban strollers even if you are staying there. Child-free adults love the bans, but families who travel to Vegas (can we say yet again that this is not a family destination?) may be seriously inconvenienced by it. The policy doesn't appear to be uniformly enforced (hotels don't want to offend parents who have plenty of dough to gamble, after all), but we've seen families and teenagers get turned away from a hotel because they couldn't produce a room key. If you're traveling with your kids, or want to be free of someone else's, your best bet is to call your chosen hotel and ask what its policy is.