Las Vegas Vacation Blog Blog

On any given summer Sunday, a line forms as early as 7 a.m. and stretches through the Hard Rock Hotel. Patrons are dressed in their Sunday bests—barely-there bikinis and sky-high heels or board shorts and white tanks—waiting to worship at the mecca of the daylife scene, Hard Rock’s weekly Rehab pool party. Almost instantly they flock to the bar, grabbing Big Gulp-sized cups of mixed drinks and soon after, the pool is brimming with boozy 20-somethings. Want to swim? Good luck. But it doesn’t matter, anyway. Swimming is hardly the prime activity at these pools. Having a good time while spending money is.

Just to walk in the door at Rehab will cost you more than $100 on a busy weekend. Let me repeat that: $100 just to walk in the door. A place to sit? That’s going to cost you extra. A bottle of booze will run you hundreds more and somewhere to put that bottle, a cabana perhaps, costs thousands more. It’s easy to see why these pool parties are the new revenue darlings of casino operators.

Today’s Strip pool parties are a much different scene than the resort pools of yesteryear, where the high roller’s wife might park herself for a tan and an umbrella drink before meeting her husband for a show and dinner after a day of gambling. Now, it’s the place for the high roller to be and be seen and yet another sign of their temporary wealth, renting miniature suites in the form of cabanas with bed, flat-screen TVs, around-the-clock bar service and a flock of pretty girls. In the cabana next door, you might find the Kardashian du jour, Holly Madison or Jersey Shore’s The Situation, all cashing in on their 15 minutes of fame.

These pools have their own entrance lines with velvet ropes at the door and have the ability to charge night life prices, raking in as much as, if not more, than some of the city’s biggest nightclubs on busy weekend afternoons. It’s a trend that started on the yachts of St. Tropez and of Miami’s South Beach, where the partying starts during the morning hours and the booze flows straight through sundown, and has made its way to Las Vegas in recent years. They blur the lines of the city’s megaclubs and hotel pools, creating a whole new category of entertainment: The dayclub.

To outsiders, spending a Sunday packed in like sardines in the heat with nowhere to sit hardly seems like a pleasant way to spend a weekend. So what’s the appeal?

That’s the thought that ran through my mind as I stood in the middle of Tao Beach shortly after my arrival to Las Vegas in the summer of 2008. The scene was right out of MTV’s Spring Break circa 1997 with partyers dancing in the tiny pool and unnaturally proportioned women lounging in cabanas. It was my “We’re not in Kansas anymore” moment. I went only once. I might not be their target market (even though I’m their age demographic), but plenty of the “new Vegas” crowd is.

“People want to come out and get some sun by the pool no matter what, but making it a nightclub atmosphere just entices them more. Everybody wants to party and they want to be in the sun while they do it. A lot of pools are kick back and relax pools but these people came to Vegas for a reason,” says Ian Kohoutek, director of night life for Hard Rock, who helped launch Rehab in 2004.

It was like nothing Las Vegas had ever seen. Rehab became an instant hit first among locals, and soon out-of-towners were flying in just to get a piece of the debaucherous scene. The weekly party is now in its eighth season, but sans the reality show that gave it its bad-boy image, and draws as many as 5,000 partygoers on a busy Sunday. Even Rehab’s competitors give it credit for kicking off the daylife trend in Las Vegas.

“What’s driven this over the last eight years is the name has established itself in the market. We can open the door on a Sunday and people flock to the doors, despite who we might have as a DJ or hosting. The biggest thing for us is trying to work our way into the other days of the market. Everyone caught on to the trend that these pools parties actually work and we can make a ton of money with very little investment,” Kohoutek says.

Soon, Wet Republic popped up at MGM Grand, the topless pool party Bare opened at the Mirage and Ditch Fridays launched at the Palms, along with a dozen others. It was like a light bulb went off with night life operators: They realized the same deep pockets that were spending at nightclubs in the evenings were going untapped during the day.

“There are these high rollers who are staying at the Mansion at MGM Grand or the Emperor’s Suite at Caesars Palace and they want to come play at our pool party. They could have lost a bunch of money but they’re still paying cash here for their tab at Rehab,” Kohoutek says. “I’ve had investment bankers from New York, or celebrities or these guys from Silicon Valley who have just sold their companies and now have all this money to spend. These girls see these guys in the cabanas and think ‘I don’t need to buy drinks for the rest of the day.’”

Kohoutek remembers the days when pool parties first came on the scene and you could rent a cabana for $300. Now, everything has a food and beverage minimum, he says. Hard Rock’s Rehab requires its VIP cabana patrons to spend between $1,000 and $20,000 in food and beverage minimums.

Last summer, casino mogul Steve Wynn stepped into the pool party game, in true Steve Wynn fashion, spending $68 million to turn the former entrance of his $2.3 billion Encore Las Vegas into the massive and ultra luxurious Encore Beach Club. The party pool complex features 26 cabanas, many of which are Strip-front, and eight two-story, 350-square-foot bungalows with private pools and private bathrooms that garner five-digit tabs on some weekends. As a result, Wynn Resorts reported a 16 percent increase in food and beverage revenue in the third quarter of 2010 after Encore Beach Club’s opening, surpassing revenue generated in other departments, with the exception of gambling.

Other Strip casinos that have hopped on the night life and daylife trend are also reaping the benefits. According to an annual report from the Gaming Control Board released in February, beverage revenue rose seven percent during the 2010 fiscal year to $909.6 million, for the 39 casinos generating annual revenue of at least $1 million. That number compares to a two percent increase in fiscal 2009.
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If you’re looking for something different to do on vacation this summer, how about playing in a giant sandbox driving bulldozers and earth movers? That’s the idea behind “Dig This,” a “construction theme park” opening in Las Vegas this summer.

It’s a 5 acre dirt park with two Caterpillar D5 track-type bulldozers and three Caterpillar 315CL hydraulic excavators. A 3 hour-package for $400 gets you a half-hour of safety and handling instruction and then you’re free to let it rip. Build a 10 foot deep trench, pile a mound, or pick and move 2-ton tires and snag basketballs from safety cones.

“Once we get our model finalized, we could move to Atlanta and New York as well as Tokyo and Australia,” the developer told Engineering News-Record.

You could also recreate this experience at home by getting a job in construction. Not only is it cheaper, they’ll actually pay you to do it.

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Much like food in a pill, Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative, and Heidi Montag’s singing career, Las Vegas’s art scene is widely regarded as a half-baked idea that, while heavily bankrolled (at least in the beginning), never really got off the ground. On vacation in Sin City last week, I scoured the strip for any signs of remaining cultural life now that much of the city’s cultural funding and many of its art professionals have left the area. My conclusion? Whatever art is left in Vegas won’t be there for long.

One sign that the proverbial canary in the Vegas art-scene mineshaft has expired came last July, when academic couple David Hickey and Libby Lumpkin — prominent champions of the arts and the visionary force behind the now-shuttered Las Vegas Art Museum — left the city in defeat. Then, in October, the Liberace Museum became the latest in a long line of the city’s cultural institutions to close due to lack of funds. These blows were temporarily countered by an influx of public art courtesy of CityCenter, a shiny hotel and shopping mall complex that opened in 2009 as home to one of the nation’s largest public installations of corporate-owned art, including sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Henry Moore. But even public art, everyone’s favorite cultural fix-it, can’t cure Las Vegas’s art problem.

It’s not that there aren’t any other art institutions left in the city. The Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art consistently mounts new — though not necessarily good — exhibitions featuring works from the hotel’s impressive holdings together with borrowed work from venerable collections like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Though many downtown galleries have closed in the last few years, others, like Brett Wesley Gallery and nonprofit collective Emergency Arts, have remained open. But the Guggenheim’s effort at opening a museum in Vegas, in collaboration with Russia’s Hermitage museum, met an ignominious, gasping end in 2008 after only 15 months of operation — an indicator of the city’s lack of cultural oxygen.

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Of all the groups of visitors that come to Las Vegas annually, you’d be hard pressed to find one that can actually transform the city and make it known a big event is going on.

Las Vegas absorbs so much from all areas like a machine that it almost looks the same day after day, unfazed.

When the NBA All-Star Game came and went, other than a few skipped bills and much publicized incidents, you wouldn’t have known. When the rodeos come to town, you see the cowboy hats and Wranglers, but for most other visitors, they wouldn’t even know it.

Comdex and MAGIC shows are only identified by casino employees, just because the tokes are always down.

The thing that really makes NASCAR stand out is the colors and fun, good-natured time all their fans have. When over 100,000 people come in for a weekend, all decked out in their gear along the Las Vegas Strip, it’s a pretty impressive sight.

Most of these fans have circled Las Vegas on their calendars as their destination spot for a vacation because they can kill two birds with one stone. Not only do they get to go to a race, but they also get to satisfy their vacation needs like no other race can. It’s Las Vegas! And they have NASCAR too!

When the first Cup race came to town 14 years ago, it also signaled the birth of NASCAR wagering as we know it today with every sports book carrying the odds and some offering a multitude of driver propositions, almost like a Super Bowl. Prior to that, only a handful of books even took bets on the weekly races.

Over the years, the 100,000 visitors a year on NASCAR weekend have become well educated on how to bet, and it adds another angle to making the race fun. You can’t bet the race in Daytona, at least legally anyway.

The Las Vegas Hilton Super Book, MGM Resorts properties and Lucky’s sports books all figure to have the most extensive list of propositions this week. Beyond odds to win, they’ll have driver matchups and all types of other things found in a box-score, like over-under cautions, winning car number, lap leaders, and picking more points combined in the race between Hendrick Motorsports drivers against Roush Racing drivers.
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The gun business is surging, evidenced by the more than 55,000 industry types at the National Shooting Sports Foundation trade show in Las Vegas this week, the Las Vegas Sun reports. The robust firearms economy is showing striking defiance of the recession, as well as the  condemnations of gun violence after the shooting of 19 people, including a congresswoman, in Tucson. Many attendees of the show said the apparently mentally ill Tucson shooter would have found a different weapon if he didn’t have a Glock. They said that with 280 million guns in the U.S. nearly one for every person, it’s not clear how effective gun-control measures can be.

The Shooting, Hunting & Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show shows the latest in shooting products. “It’s like waking up on Christmas everywhere you turn,” says John Brand of Logan’s Gun Shop in Oklahoma. The big, enthusiastic crowd would appear to be emblematic of the wider gun market: In 2009, the FBI and states processed 14 million requests through the instant background check system, up from 12.7 million in 2008. In Nevada, the number of firearm background checks increased from 60,000 in 2007 to 94,000 in 2009, an increase of more than 50 percent. The figure dipped, although not much, in 2010. Gary Giudice, a spokesman for Smith & Wesson, says guns have been a growth industry for years as more Americans experience the fun and challenge of hunting and target shooting or decide they want to arm themselves for protection.

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Final preparations are under way to accommodate the thousands of people expected to begin 2011 in Las Vegas. The Strip and downtown are expecting 320,000 visitors for New Year’s Eve festivities, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Preparations for the elaborate fireworks show on the Strip have been under way for more than two weeks.

More than eight minutes of pyrotechnics will be shot off from the roofs of seven casinos: MGM Grand, Aria, Planet Hollywood, Caesars Palace, Treasure Island, the Venetian and the Stratosphere.

Revelers will also find plenty of entertainment downtown, where the Fremont Street Experience is hosting its 3rd annual TributePalozza with 12 bands performing throughout the night and a virtual fireworks display on the LED canopy at midnight. Admission is $20.

Dozens of other events are scattered across the valley. Visit the Las Vegas Sun New Year’s Eve guide for a complete list of tonight’s festivities.

Metro Police said they will be strictly enforcing two special rules for the holiday.

County and city laws ban metal and glass containers on the Strip and downtown from 6 p.m. Dec. 31 to 6 a.m. Jan. 1. Police also ask revelers not to carry large backpacks or other bags that could conceal cans or bottles.
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Beyond the casino floor and after golf, Las Vegas knows how to deliver high R.P.M. entertainment.

The desert that makes for one of the West’s top golf destinations is also an outdoor playground for bikes, ATVs, sky-diving and just about anything else you can do with a lot of space and sunshine.

If your golf group is out to splurge after a big night at the tables – or simply avoid the pit altogether – plenty is happening in Vegas after 18 holes.

Helicopter tours

The only canyon I ever seem to view in Vegas is the empty crevasse in my wallet after a late night on the tables.

The Grand Canyon, on the other hand, is about a four-hour drive from Vegas – or better yet, a 45-minute ride via helicopter. Make the trip and you can see a bird’s-eye view of one of the American West’s great natural wonders. And no need camping out in the wilderness, you’ll be back to your hotel by sunset.

If closer, man-made wonders are more your thing, book a helicopter ride to Hoover Dam, or take in the Las Vegas Strip from above. $100-300
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The newest downtown Las Vegas venture is now open. A ribbon-cutting ceremony ushered in the opening of Meet Las Vegas on Tuesday. Meet Las Vegas is a three-story, 30,000 square foot convention venue that sits on the corner of 4th and Bridger.

City leaders hope the facility will bring corporate events, trade shows and conventions to downtown Las Vegas. “We have so many things happening in downtown,” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said. “The one thing that we were really missing, other than an arena or stadium, was a convention center.”

Supporters of the project view it as another step in the city’s ongoing effort to revitalize the area. “I think that what it shows people is that downtown has huge potential,” Meet Las Vegas CEO Dan Maddux said. “A lot of people, to a degree, have forgotten about downtown. There is so much room for expansion in growth in the downtown area.”

Former Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce Chairperson Fafie Moore agrees. “This is the type of thing that our community needs, and it’s going to help us do the turnaround,” she said.

Andrew Leary runs his Super Cleaners dry cleaning business downtown. He sees potential growth in the area. “Just a few years ago, people were turned off about the idea of opening a business downtown,” Leary said. “I think the more the people can see downtown, the more they’ll appreciate it… Hopefully, (Meet Las Vegas) brings in more business, especially with conventioneers.”

With projects like Meet Las Vegas, Symphony Park, the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, the Smith Center for the Performing Arts, and a new downtown city hall, Mayor Goodman says downtown is on the right track. “A lot of things are happening in an economy where, in other places, nothing is happening. We have a new city hall building that’s being built and great plans for the future,” he said.

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A wax museum on the Las Vegas Strip is unveiling a statue of President Barack Obama in a replica of the Oval Office just in time for Presidents Day.

The display was shown Monday at Madame Tussauds.

The museum says the Oval Office model is its only replica of the room west of the Mississippi River. It says the model of Obama standing behind his desk with his arms folded cost $300,000.

Obama is expected to visit Las Vegas later this week.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A wax museum on the Las Vegas Strip is unveiling a statue of President Barack Obama in a replica of the Oval Office just in time for Presidents Day.

The display was shown Monday at Madame Tussauds.

The museum says the Oval Office model is its only replica of the room west of the Mississippi River. It says the model of Obama standing behind his desk with his arms folded cost $300,000.

Obama is expected to visit Las Vegas later this week.

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World-class shopping in Vegas? Yes, among the scads of kitsch and Elvis memorabilia (looking for a piece of the King’s pillowcase?), there’s also the ne plus ultra from Cartier and Yves St. Laurent. The square footage in the Forum Shops at Caesars alone is the most valuable retail real estate in the country; bankrolls are dropped there as readily as on the gaming tables. It’s the variety of options that has pushed Las Vegas near the ranks of New York, London, or Rome: You could tote home a vintage slot machine or Lenôtre chocolates from the only place in the United States where you can buy them (at Paris Las Vegas, in case you’re salivating). You might start to think those darn casinos only get in the way of your shopping safaris.

Strip shopping malls take their themes to extremes: you can stroll along a Venice canal at the Venetian or traverse North African trade routes at the Aladdin. Most Strip hotels offer expensive dresses, swimsuits, jewelry, and menswear; almost all have shops offering logo merchandise for the hotel or its latest show. Inside the casinos the gifts are elegant and expensive. Outside, all the Elvis clocks and gambling-chip toilet seats you never wanted to see are available in the tacky gift shops. Beyond the Strip, Vegas shopping encompasses such extremes as a couture ball gown in a vintage store and, in a Western store, a fine pair of Tony Lamas left over from the town’s cowboy days. Shoppers looking for more practical items can head for neighborhood malls, supermarkets, shopping centers, and specialty stores. And to avoid the stratospheric prices on the Strip, shoppers not averse to driving a bit can find the same high-ticket items at lower prices at the town’s factory outlet malls.

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