Tag Archives for las vegas.
A couple of weeks ago I flagged a movement to rename Las Vegas airport, ditching former Senator Pat McCarran’s name and replacing it with former Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid’s. Things have moved quickly, and Clark County voted to move forward and ask the FAA for its blessing to honor the retired Senate Democrat.
This is less about honoring Harry Reid and more about cancelling former Democratic Senator Pat McCarran, for whom the airport is currently named.
One of the most annoying features of hotels is the resort fee, a mandatory charge that’s not included in the room rate in order to deceive customers – to make a hotel look less expensive than it is. The practice spread beyond resorts to city hotels, and became known as a ‘destination charge.’ Even with many of the supposed-inclusions the resort fees pay for suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic, the charges persist.
Las Vegas is a city where resort fees play a hugely distortionary role. Hotels cut prices to rock bottom levels to fill rooms. And there’s a way to get an even further discount – and skip the resort fees. Hotels that want to compete in the future need to pay attention.
Alaska Airlines flight 1367 from Las Vegas to Portland departed over 4 hours late on Saturday after a a man drove a truck through the fence at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport and onto the tarmac – and proceeded to climb onto the wing of the Boeing 737-900.
You can see that he doesn’t stop there. He badly wants to scale the winglet. But he struggles, so he tosses his shoes overboard – at police. The man loses his balance and falls off the plane. He’s surrounded by officers and taken into custody.
Here’s a new twist on the age old marriage proposal in the skies. A woman who met ‘her soulmate’ online 10 days earlier showed up at the Las Vegas airport to propose to him.
Since meeting they had video chatted every night, but they had never met in person. This would be their first time seeing each other in person – and he doesn’t know she’s coming.
A fight broke out at the Las Vegas airport on Wednesday. They’re near slot machines, and not a gate, so it doesn’t appear to be passengers losing it over their flight. And there’s no reason to suspect it’s election-related.
What’s amazing is that there are actually two fights and they’re happening simultaneously beside each other. First you see a passenger in green going ‘fists of fury’ on a passenger dressed in brown, but notice to the right that there’s another group – a passenger in a black and red shirt doing his best Rowdy Roddy Piper on another passenger in all-black.
As properties re-open in Las Vegas it looks like there’s a new opportunity for a surprise ‘gotcha,’ a COVID-19 surcharge. When destinations around the world that have re-opened, or that are looking to, are practically paying you to come, we’re starting to see extra charges not listed on the menu show up on bills in Las Vegas.
And yes – it’s identified as a “COVID-19 crisis” surcharge.
With Las Vegas preparing to re-open, American Express is making a bet on the future of travel and the gaming resort city. They’ve announced this morning that they’re expanding their Las Vegas airport Centurion lounge by approximately 50%. The lounge, once it re-opens, will stay open throughout most of the construction periods with only brief closures.
With golf courses deserted and no customers, $69 tee times are the new $13 cross country airfares
In August the CEO of Caesars declared that resort fees could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for Las Vegas lodging. Yet just two months later Caesars raised resort fees at Caesar’s Palace, Nobu and Rio.
Now with visitor arrivals to the U.S. under pressure from coronavirus – and the entire Chinese market large cut off from travel to Las Vegas – you’d expect prices to be reduced, not raised. Yet effective March 3 Caesars is raising resort fees at Harrah’s, Flamingo, Linq and Bally’s.
UNLV’s Professor Stephen Miller, who runs their Center for Business and Economic Research, finds that resort and parking fees are driving Southern California visitors from Las Vegas.
There are actually some very basic propositions here, each one of which is completely obvious.
Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel -- a topic he has covered since 2002.
Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »
