User profile: dswilsQLD4217

Last time we were at Planet Hollywood we had to fight off an army of time share touts every time we went thru the front door, pretending to want to give us discount vouchers and offers. No way this should be going on at a major strip casino, and the same goes for NYNY. The old Aladdin at least was themed and a bit interesting, the new Planet Hollywood has a modern exterior and a bland interior which looks like our hometown casino here in Australia with some fake movie posters for things food related near the buffet. Great buffet by the way if getting up in price a bit. And if you think about it, its the best part of the Planet Hollywood and its all that is left of the Aladdin. Anyone stupid enough to put off their customers at the door deserves to lose money. We are due back in a month and will not be going to Planet Hollywood. Coming from literally half way across the world I want to see something I can't see and do at home, bring on the volcanoes, fountains, moving statues, lions and krispy kreme.

Coming all the way from Australia we are looking for quality budget accommodation on the strip. The Trop got us on two occasions in recent years and we appreciated the fact that it was a smaller casino but really well placed to some of the bigger ones. However they did not get us on our last trip in October for 3 main reasons 1) Excalibur beat them on price, 2) we have noticed Tropicana was getting shabbier and shabbier 3) the food - the buffet has to genuinely be the worst in Vegas for the price, the diner is cute but overpriced and the coffee shack abysmal. The reservations staff have always been amazing and we had no problems checking in, but the problem for us was that we saw few staff off the gaming floor and fewer who spoke English. Those who could help did. There is a real need on the strip for a nice place to stay and feel welcome without breaking the bank and the Trop is well placed to capture that. They need to get on the books of more travel wholesalers at decent prices worldwide. If we had not found the Trop on the web we would not have been able to book thru an agent as none had heard of them and were all trying to sell Circus Circus to the budget end of the market or Excalibur at $112 per person per night! All the Vegas hotels would do well to keep a closer eye on what they are being sold at internationally thru the wholesalers because belive me it can be up to six or seven times what their websites sell at!!!

We have just spent two weeks in Las Vegas from Australia, loved the town have been there 5 times over the past 7 years, and have a timeshare on the Strip but we won't be rushing back for several reasons. The main one is economic, we saved for almost 18 months for the trip and the airfares were just under $2000 each for the 13 hour flight from Brisbane to LA, then they wanted another $150 each to fly from LA to Vegas. We were told Vegas was hurting and there would be lots of specials - well there weren't and we were hurting with the exchange rate - less than 70 cents US for 1 Australian dollar. Not so much as a free T shirt or a casino coffee mug. The fabled "comps" of Vegas were just that- a fable. The weekend room rates when we moved to a casino were prohibitive and with no in room refrigerators or microwaves the food and coffee bills killed us especially as the good cheap buffet seems to be a thing of the past. The strip looks like a construction zone, if we weren't being bothered by people handing out prostitute cards it was timeshare touts (even inside the casinos). The theming that made Vegas so different is being slowly eroded so that from inside the casinos we could be at our hometown casino (where the payouts are better by the way.) To top it all off I was one of what seemed to be a number of people who had their wallets stolen at the Excalibur. In case I sound too negative I have to say that once we worked out how badly the slots weren't paying, we used our slots money to do some great shopping at the outlet malls and that every Las Vegan we dealt with both on the strip and off was really great.
However for what we had to pay to get there and stay the casino managements are going to need to make us feel a lot more like they want our business to attract us back.