In most cities the hotel is where the holiday is stored. In Las Vegas the hotels are the attraction: they hold the casinos, the theatres, the restaurants, the shopping and the pools, and a visitor can spend three days without once stepping outside one. Walking into half a dozen of them, without staying in any, is a perfectly sensible way to see the city.
How to choose, in practice
- Position matters more than the theme. The Strip is four miles long and the resorts are enormous, so a hotel at the wrong end adds an hour of walking to every day. The middle — roughly between the Bellagio and the Venetian — puts most things within reach.
- The room rate is not the price. Almost every resort adds a compulsory nightly resort fee at check-out, and most now charge for parking as well. Comparisons made on the headline rate are meaningless.
- The casino is in the way, by design. Every route to a lift, a restaurant or the street crosses the gaming floor, which in Nevada means crossing a room where smoking is permitted. Las Vegas casinos covers why, and which resort is the exception.
- Older is not cheaper and newer is not better. The resorts refit constantly, and a tower refurbished last year may sit inside a hotel that opened in 1966.
The themed era, and what happened to it
The run of resorts built as replicas — Rome, Venice, Paris, Egypt, New York — belongs to a particular stretch between the late 1980s and about 2000, and it began with one building. The Mirage opened in 1989 and proved that a resort could earn its keep as a spectacle, after which every new property on the Strip arrived with a theme attached.
That stopped. The resorts built since — Wynn, the Cosmopolitan, Resorts World, Fontainebleau — are expensive rather than themed, and sell design instead of replica. The older themed properties remain, which is why the Strip reads as a sequence of decades rather than a single idea.
What has gone and what is coming
Two of the places a visitor might expect to find are no longer there. The Mirage closed on 17 July 2024 and is being rebuilt as a guitar-shaped Hard Rock, expected in 2027. The Tropicana closed and was imploded on 9 October 2024, with a ballpark for the Athletics going up on the site. Names are also recycled here — the Sahara that stands today is not the Sahara that closed in 2011, and Bally's was renamed the Horseshoe in 2022 — so older accounts need reading with care.
The pages below cover six of the resorts in more detail. General practicalities for the city are on the Las Vegas page.