Resort Fees, Paying For Parking And The Demise Of Free Drinks Is The New Sin In Sin City
By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Travel Blogger
It used to be when you got a room in Las Vegas, for, say $39, that’s what it cost you, $39. Plus the hotel tax, of course, but that’s the case everywhere. It was still a bargain.
It also used to be when you parked your car (if you drove which a lot of people from California and Arizona do or you rented a car) at the hotel, it was free.
It also used to be if you sat down at a video poker game, you got free drinks, regardless of how much money you bet or how often you played the game.
Now, however, Las Vegas is charging for all those things and quite frankly, it’s starting to getting me ticked off at Sin City.
All the hotels now have “resort fees” (click here for a rundown on Vegas hotel resorts fees) and most are charging you to park (click here for a rundown on Vegas parking fees). They are also starting taking away our free drinks, the most sacred of all Vegas perks.
I can put up with the lines, the waiting game and high drink prices in the Las Vegas mega-nightclubs, because they are awesome. I can live with $20 minimum bets on some gambling games (well, not really but that’s only at prime time at some casinos) and can even accept the fact that Las Vegas not only has a hockey team but is getting an NFL team, too. (This is to demonstrate I’m not opposed to change.)
But I can’t readily accept paying for things that used to be free in Vegas.
And those resort fees – well, they often more than double the cost of your room. Vegas is cashing in on what I call the “airline mentality” of charging for everything that’s not nailed down to the floor, so to speak.
What’s next: an extra towel fee (only one per bed during your entire stay, folks!), an additional charge for an extra room key? Don’t put it past them.
The standard reaction among people is like this one from a friend of mine just the other day: “the cost for our room turned out to be double what we expected with all the fees, but we paid it anyway because we were already there and, well, we were in Vegas.”
This shrug of the shoulders among travelers to Vegas is another thing that ticks me off because the hotels know that’s the attitude people take to their ridiculous fees. And they wil keep coming up with them until people stand up and protest.
Which is precisely what I’m doing here in this blog post.
Cheers!
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