MGM’s Aria Las Vegas charges guests so much for water that it strikes down a fundamental precept in economics that has held for 150 years. As one guest writes to me, a bottle of water in the room there costs $26!
Also, the person restocking the mini bar..Knocked on my door while I was taking a break between conference and dinner, was grateful to get in. I hadn’t looked in it, he cleaned out of the mini bar – food crammed in the fridge from two guests ago. Told me they are short staffed and can’t keep up.
Told me the price after I had already (out of thirst, in the desert) consumed (fortunately only one) bottle of water. Fortunately the Starbucks downstairs sold water for “only $7.45”.
As an undergraduate economics major I learned the ‘diamonds-water paradox’ that water keeps us alive yet is cheap, while diamonds are useless for survival yet very expensive. Market prices seem to ignore life-or-death usefulness! Adam Smith posed this in The Wealth of Nations,
Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything… A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.
Prices are set “at the margin,” not by total usefulness. Water is extremely important overall, but the usefulness of an extra unit of water (at current levels of supply) is very low. It’s ubiquitous and has a low market price. Meanwhile, diamonds are ardly life or death but the next carat is scarce and highly desired – so expensive.
Marginal utility is the additional satisfaction from the next unit, not from all units combined. Early marginalists economists—Jevons, Menger, and Walras formalized this in the 1870s, dissolving the paradox.
And yet… Aria in Las Vegas proves there really was no paradox after all. Water in the desert is crucial to survival and incredibly expensive for guests staying there!
They have clearly given up on any idea of hospitality. I would think, though, that a $36.28 per night resort fee (inclusive of tax) might be high enough to offer a single bottle of water as one of its inclusions. I guess not!
You are better off actually buying water at inflated airport prices when you land and bringing them to the hotel. This is the perfect example of the kind of out of sample cost that make people feel cheated on a Las Vegas trip, leaving customers with a bad taste in their mouth. And that is dangerous heading into a Las Vegas downturn.
Water is free. Just turn on the faucet.
As Globalist at the Rio or Diamond at Resorts World I get it free.
MGM can blow.
Aria has comped water (MGM ‘purified’) in the rooms too, but the fancy stuff (in the fridge) is always a rip-off.
I aspire to be someone that just doesn’t care about the mini-bar prices, but I doubt I ever will be (even if I had f-you money!), and there’s a CVS within 3 mins walk of the Aria, so go there for $2 water, or the casino downstairs for $7 water, but
How much is the Bud Light? $45?
@L3 – You’re assuming the reclaimed municipal water system in Las Vegas is drinkable.
The Las Vegas of today is way more expensive than the Las Vegas of 30 years ago. I rarely go there now.
I used to have to go to Vegas for work. Hated the Strip area and the costs. I’ll go to Dubai, Bangkok or Singapore anytime over Vegas.
Been 10 years since I’ve been there.
I guess I better not tell you names of the ten different brands of bottled water … some of them major-major, that are actually Municipal Water from Corpus Christi, Texas … this from the City website: “The City of Corpus Christi itself does not bottle and sell water under its own brand, but it does supply the water used by these companies.” I think they should cut a deal with Sweetwater, Texas, just W of Abilene.
@ Pete – when were you at Aria ??? Only room type at Aria that has comp MGM brand purified bottle water is skysuites
@ ORDnHKG good point. We normally stay in the suites (although they’ve also axed the free limo transfers unless you’re in a 2 bed suite), but we put our kids in a normal room and they had water. I doubt it was status related as all rooms were booked under my (then) Pearl status, but who know. This was also 10 months ago, so things have likely got worse, I agree with others, everything in Vegas is starting to feel like a money-grab, and since most the hotels are also running at a loss, seems like the entire system is just broken.
But how many meals were you able to yield from that leftover food left by those generous “two guests ago” ? Betcha came out ahead on that ‘comp’ when compared to that exorbitant extortionately inflated bottled tap water ! ..lol…
You knew it was going to be expensive, but you drank it. Rich do not care and obviously you are not rich. It always surprises me how people tend to eat/drink more at airports hotels as if they just came out of hunger or something. How Adam Smith’s principles apply to Vegas; people get tgere to gamble. Conferences: only presenter, discussant, conference organizers and losers attend the sessions, which is another surprising thing to have conferences in Vegas.
Nickle and Diming I can see ‘Vegas doing. $36 for a Premium bottle of H20 is off my chart. Was a 3-4 time a year visitor to Sin City pre covid. Haven’t been back since and the long range travel radar is negatory for… forever.
@Ben B – Conferences? You mean wasting several days of your time and several thousand dollars of your employer’s money, staying at an overpriced hotel, enjoying mediocre-at-best catering and a laughable open bar all for the privilege of attending blog posts, but performed live?
One more time, thank you, Gary, for continuing to ‘name and shame’ properties that do this egregious nonsense.
On water, I’m reminded of the ending of the film The Big Short, where they say Michael Burry, the investor who called the 2008 financial crises, claimed that water scarcity is one of the world’s most pressing issues, and as demand rises, the value of water will increase. Well, maybe Burry’s onto something.
Also, screw Nestle. Horrible company behind much of the water-speculation.
Governments around the world should follow Israel and the Gulf states’ lead in desalination infrastructure. We could practically prevent sea-level rise while turning our deserts green if we leveraged that technology properly. Likely, a combination of nuclear power to fuel the entire process would make it all possible. Anyway, utopia in our time, right? Or, we can just do WW3 instead. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool.
Supermarket. Dozen 16 oz/500 ml bottles. Worldwide under Us$8.
I don’t play well with highway robbers.
Aria won’t get my business.
Curious how they got a $32 Resort Fee there when it’s been $55?