Venetian Suites in Las Vegas

Venetian Suite, Las Vegas
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Five luxury hotel casino properties on the strip that get a lot of buzz as "THE place to stay in Las Vegas" are the Wynn and her new companion property the Encore, the Venetian and her companion Palazzo Las Vegas, and the Bellagio.

If you find fault with the rooms in any of these places you probably need to get your head examined (or you are way too wealthy).

Our Venetian king bed suite was even more splendid than the online photos suggest and an incredible bargain at the $109 "Twitter Special" rate offered there every few weeks.

The beautiful bath complete with double sinks and a TV made this a splendid room but it was combined with a beautiful king sized bed area next to a sunken living room with a large couch, desk, and table. The room was spotlessly clean and elegantly appointed.

Note as usual that if you can adjust your Las Vegas visits to mid-week where there are no holidays or major conventions you will enjoy a *huge* savings on luxury rooms which are often less than half the weekend costs. Even rooms of regular quality such as those at the older strip hotels like the Sahara or Tropicana are going to be cheaper mid-week. Where you should expect to pay $150 for the Venetian mid week you'll probably find rooms at the Sahara for under $50. Note though that Las Vegas mid week offers you the kind of luxury you can't enjoy elsewhere at any price, so I think a good "budget with style" strategy is to stay in luxury on weekdays and move to a modest priced hotel for the weekends.

Venetian Hotel Suite, Las Vegas

Venetian Hotel Suite, Las Vegas
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Our Suite at the Venetian in Las Vegas was really impressive with a sunken living room/office area below the bedroom. The bathroom was huge and elegant with two sinks, deep tub, shower, makeup corner.

These suites are usually an amazing bargain Sun-Thursday but the price will rise to $250+ per night on the weekends. For a great vegas vacation get a good airline deal and go *mid week* to enjoy many of the same hotel amenities as the big players for about 1/2 the cost.

Bellagio Fountains and Paris Hotel

Bellagio Fountains and Paris Hotel
Originally uploaded by Tom Harwood

This is a great shot taken by my friend Tom from *behind* the Bellagio Fountains inside the Bellagio looking out to Paris Las Vegas with Bally's on the left.

The Bellagio Fountains are one of the "must see" attractions when you are in Las Vegas with a spectacular water and music show throughout the day for most of the day through about midnight.

Other amazing attractions inside the Bellagio are the nature conservatory, sculpted glass ceiling by Chiluly, a massive chocolate fountain, and Cirque du Soleil's spectacular show "O" where the performers constantly test the limits of human acrobatic magnificence with unbelievable jumps, dives, and synchronized acrobatics.

This acrobatic and artistic virtuosity, combined with surreal imagery and music in one of the world's most sophisticated and ultra-engineered stage settings, makes "O" one of the world's most exciting and amazing stage shows.

Hotwire Hotel Identification Trick

If you book a lot of hotels you know that Hotwire often offers major discounts on great and medium quality hotels with the catch that you cannot know the exact location or name of the property.

I've used Hotwire often for Silicon Valley trips and I've been happy with the results - often paying about $50 per night for hotels that would normally run $75-$100 and up.

For major destinations like Las Vegas you can click on through the "continue" button after you have your list of hotels at Hotwire, and review the "TripAdvisor" review information at the lower left to (sometimes) learn the number of reviews for a given property. Now open a new browser window and go to TripAdvisor.com to review hotels in that map area.

This will often specifically identify the property for you *before you book*. This is a quirk and may be "fixed" soon, though I'm guessing the hotels are OK with this as long as it keeps the bookings going and higher paying customers don't find out that their neighbor paid half what they did for an identical room.

Here at Las Vegas blog we'll soon be posting a monthly chart where we try to identify these for you so you can use Hotwire more effectively.

Cirque's One Drop Water Charity Rocks!

Join Cirque du Soleil's founder and support the water charity "One Drop", which helps bring clean water to those who do not share the cozy comforts those of us in most in most of the world are lucky enough to enjoy: http://www.onedrop.org

Bud Light $100,000 Hardbat Classic - Ping Pong Mania heads to Las Vegas this June

As an avid Table Tennis player I'm very excited to see the Bud Light Hardbat Classic Table Tennis Tournament head to Las Vegas on June 26-28. ESPN will cover the event and we'll see 1000 players compete for 100,000 first prize - huge money for the sport of Table Tennis and I'm pretty sure the biggest prize in US Table Tennis history.

Hardbat Table Tennis is *not* the mainstay of this sport, where spinny rubber rules and relatively few serious tournament players still use the old school "hard bat". Combine this with some handicapping rules at the tournament and it'll be sure to lead to fun and hard to predict outcomes.

Website for the Hardbat Classic

You can also follow the classic on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/hardbatclassic

Vegas in Trouble

CNN is reporting very low travel numbers for Las Vegas year to year and although the economy appears to be stabilizing it's not clear that'll prevent severe challenges to the Las Vegas business landscape. Here are the highlights from this Las Vegas economic story:

• State unemployment rate 10.4 percent, convention attendance down 30 percent
  
• Casino slashes room rates, lays off workers -- including 28-year veteran
  
• Mayor Goodman says, "I didn't see this coming," but still optimistic

CNN Reports