Vegas is not cheap unless you stay off the strip or at places like the Luxor. Food varies from cheap to 5 star, but most is very expensive. FLights are fairly expensive even with low oil prices.
Been there many times, time to start going elsewhere.
Don’t book thru hotel dot com they hit u with a separate booking fee, in their “small” print.
It has become a popular destination for large conventions rather than a mecca for individual gamblers and run of the mill tourists. Costs are always higher near large convention centers. The attendees are pretty much locked into using the nearby resources and are willing to pay a higher price for the convenience.
Whatever happened to the United States of America....?
First let me say I don’t gamble or womanize.
I went to Vegas 20 years ago to a trade show expenses paid.
The strip was decent, it was clean (as in no trash on the sidewalks and road) and the food was great. There was lots of fresh fruit and the prices were extremely reasonable even cheap especially for the quailty.
Two years ago we moved one of our foster sons who was is in the Army from Fort Bliss to Fort Lewis. His wife wanted to stop in Vegas because she had never been there so we did stop. It was a dump. It was filthy, trash everywhere, hookers coming right up to me while holding my wife’s hand, bums living one street off the strip, buildings half built, buildings on the strip boarded up, and very questionable looking “immigrants” everywhere. Probably what stood out to me the most was the debauchery of a sexual nature that was much much more prevalent on the strip than 18 years earlier. It was very much in your face.
I asked a guy that worked in Vegas about my observation. He said that when the economy went done all the smut that was off to he strip came to the strip.
Search youtube, sort by date to get the newest vids, skip over the real estate listings and Bellagio fountains vids, you'll eventually get to some of those 'walking the strip' vids, then you'll see what I am talking about.
Vegas adapts quickly or else it dies.
It doesn’t want to die.
So instead of catering primarily to American gamblers, who happen to have many non-vegas choices, it’s pursuing younger nightclub/dayclub goers and chinese gamblers. These two groups have large disposable incomes. It makes no sense to me that they do, but they do.
The convention business and resorts are the two other pillars keeping vegas afloat.