Las Vegas Vacation Blog Blog

Although Las Vegas has more hotel rooms than any other city in America, there are some travelers who prefer distinctly different accommodations when visiting Sin City — someone else’s house.

Staying in private residences in the Vegas area, which boasts nearly 150,000 hotel rooms, has become very popular in the last decade, says Michele Pombo, who deals exclusively in such rentals for Southwest Management Group.

“Number one, you get more bang for your buck … plus you enjoy the kind of privacy you can’t possibly have in a hotel,” Pombo says. “For instance, you can have your swimming pool, but you don’t have to share it. And if your children are with you, you don’t have to walk through a smoky casino every time you go to your room.”
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Partly cloudy skies and temperatures climbing into the mid 70s are on the way to the Las Vegas Valley today, according to the National Weather Service.

Although there will be some variable high clouds, a generally dry northwest flow will be over the area into the weekend, the weather service said.

That will allow daytime temperatures to warm to above normal readings by Saturday, climbing into the mid to upper 80s, forecasters said.

At 4:56 a.m. today, the temperature at McCarran International Airport was 53 degrees, which is the normal low for today’s date. The record low was 38 degrees, set in 1983.

Around the valley just before 5 a.m., temperatures were 50 degrees at North Las Vegas Airport, 49 degrees at Nellis Air Force Base and 49 degrees at Henderson Executive Airport.

Temperatures in the valley were to rise today to 68 degrees on the west side of the valley and around 75 degrees on the east side, forecasters said. The normal high for today’s date is 78 degrees and the record high was 95 degrees, set in 2002 and 1962.

Temperatures are expected to drop overnight to 46 degrees on the west side of the valley and around 50 on the east side, forecasters said.

Friday’s high will climb to 76 degrees on the west side of the valley and around 82 on the east side, they said.

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The new census numbers say Las Vegas is practically a ghost town.

When the housing bubble blew and the economy sank, thousands of Southern Nevadans pulled up stakes and abandoned their homes, leaving one in seven houses a vacant shell.

That’s what the numbers say, anyway.

But as is often the case with statistics, the numbers don’t tell the whole story, local demographers and housing experts say.

“There’s no doubt it’s ground zero in the foreclosure situation, but to imply that it’s a ghost town … that’s not true,” said Dennis Smith of Home Builders Research, a Las Vegas-based real estate research firm.

The numbers went public in February with the first major release of data collected during the 2010 census. Along with statistics on population and racial demographics, the census released what it calls occupancy data, which is a tally of total “housing units” and how many are vacant.

The numbers showed nearly 125,000 empty housing units in Clark County, which pushed the county’s vacancy rate to 14.9 percent and drove the statewide numbers to 14.3 percent, 11th worst in the nation.

States worse off than Nevada included Florida, Arizona, Vermont and Maine, the worst with a 22.8 percent vacancy rate.

The issue, local demographers say, is how the Census Bureau defines a housing unit. The definition includes just about everything, from single-family homes and apartments to weekly motels and time-share condominiums. It also includes empty homes that are for rent or for sale.

Jon Wardlaw, assistant planning manager for Clark County, said he believes the local vacancy numbers have been inflated with the proliferation of high-rise condo-hotels and vacation time shares that get counted as housing units but are not primary residences.

“Who lives in a time share? You can’t. So is it a hotel or something else?” said the demographer, whose own calculations put the county home vacancy rate at about 8 percent.
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The U.S. dance music festival that ended in chaos last year after more than 100 revellers were admitted to hospital after fans scrambled to gain access has moved to Las Vegas.

Organisers of the Electric Daisy Carnival were heavily criticized following the event at the Memorial Coliseum and Exposition Park in Los Angeles, which was headlined by Moby.

Official reports suggest many of the fans injured were caught as crowds rushed the gates and barriers in a bid to force their way into the event, which 185,000 music fans attended.

The promoters, Insomnia, have since hired Investigative Advisory Group, a consulting firm that has experience creating overall safety and security protocols for large venues, to analyze their current and proposed safety protocols and procedures for the company’s music festivals throughout the U.S.

They also established an ‘18 and older’ policy for all its dance music festivals after a 15-year-old reveller died from a drug overdose at the festival.

And they’re not letting the events of last year’s festival halt plans for a 2011 bash - this year’s Electric Daisy Carnival will be held at Las Vegas Motor Speedway over the final weekend in June.

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Here’s a way to stay and play a while on the Strip — and save. Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino Las Vegas takes 25% off room rates for a four-night stay.

The deal: This is pretty straightforward: Book four nights to get a quarter off the tab at Planet Hollywood. The hotel-casino seems to take pride in not charging resort fees and even sponsors a Vegas No Resort Fees page on Facebook. Use the promotion code “25DISC” when making a reservation.

When: The offer is good through Sept. 1; blackout dates apply. (To see discount prices, check the hotel’s calendar that displays room rates by the month.)

Tested: I looked for the discount on Planet Hollywood’s website and found availability April 18 to 22. The room I found, called “Hollywood Hip,” had two queen beds and cost $327 plus tax for four nights. The same room on the same dates without the deal ran $109 plus tax per night, or $436 for the four nights.  (Prices on those dates may have changed since I checked.)

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Mobster Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, infamous for his brutality, once reportedly squeezed a man’s head in a vice until his eyes popped out of their sockets.

But when he wasn’t carrying out brutal interrogations or fulfilling contract killings — duties required of him as a made man for the mob — he was playing the role of dutiful father.

Spilotro and other mobsters with a Las Vegas connection all had softer, gentler sides that have rarely been acknowledged, says Jay Bloom, founder and managing partner of the Las Vegas Mob Experience at the Tropicana.

Bloom hopes the new attraction changes that by showing publicly the soft guy side that Spilotro, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Sam Giancana, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky possessed.

The Las Vegas Mob Experience celebrated its grand opening Wednesday. It is not to be confused with the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, popularly known as the Mob Museum, which is scheduled to open later this year in downtown Las Vegas.

The Mob Museum will concentrate more on the law enforcement perspective, says Michael Unger, chief executive officer of Eagle Group Holdings, the parent company of the Mob Experience, while “we will focus on the bad guys.”

The “show-seum is a little bit entertainment, a little bit excitement and a little bit history all rolled together,” Unger says. “We expose the human side of these men, if you will. Siegel was a great father. Same thing with Spilotro. They were good family men.”

Several family members of the infamous men, including Millicent Siegel Rosen, daughter of Siegel; Spilotro’s son, Vincent, and his widow, Nancy; Meyer Lansky II and Cythina Duncan, grandchildren of Lansky; and Giancana’s grandson, Carl Manno, donated or loaned more than 1,500 artifacts to be displayed. Among them are Spilotro’s baby shoes and his handguns; Siegel’s home movies, furniture and love letters; and Lansky’s golf clubs and personal diaries.

“It’s quite a showcase,” says 80-year-old Rosen. “People have been after me for years to do something about my father, but I never wanted to get involved in anything. But when I met Jay, his ideas were different. I was very impressed with the way he treated my father.”
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A new study suggests that people in Las Vegas are spending less time gambling, due to the rising popularity of online casino. When they are playing games in the casino, they are generally wagering lower amounts in games such as craps, slots and blackjack.

The study was done by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, an agency that promotes tourism in Las Vegas, has reported that 80 percent of tourists spent an average of $466 per person in 2010, whereas in 2009 the average person spent $482 on casino gambling.

The study shows not only are tourists spending less money gambling but also they also spent less time playing in the casinos. In 2009 it was reported that casino tourists gambled for an average of 3.2 hours per day. In 20010, that time has lowered to less than 3 hours per day.

While Las Vegas tourists have reduced their casino spending in 2010, but in other areas of their vacation it has risen. There has been a rise in the expense of hotel rooms, food and beverage, transportation, shopping, shows and sightseeing. It appears that Las Vegas has much more to offer than casinos and gambling.

One of the reasons given for this decline is the rise in popularity of the online casinos. Tourists are satisfied and enjoy the online casino experience due to convenience, incentive bonuses and promotions they can’t get at a land based casino. For them, the reason to come to Las Vegas is due to the need to complete the gambling experience in other areas you can’t get online such as the sights and sounds of sin city.

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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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For the first time in more than three years, the passenger count at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas posted consecutive monthly increases.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports the 2.9 million people who passed through the airport in February marked a 2.4 percent increase from one year ago and followed a 5 percent increase in January.

January’s count was inflated by a calendar fluke that saw a couple of major conventions move one month ahead from their previous slots.

Still, the last time consecutive monthly increases occurred was October 2007, before the recession and US Airways’ decision to dismantle its McCarran hub prompted a major drop in air traffic.

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Say goodbye to the 80s. Afternoon temperatures will be about 10 degrees cooler today than they were Wednesday in the Las Vegas Valley.

While Las Vegas will get some clouds, a stalled cold front will bring showers and possibly a few thunderstorms to areas east of the valley today, according to the National Weather Service.

A large Pacific storm will bring periods of breezy to windy conditions Saturday through Tuesday, along with chances for valley rain and mountain snow, the weather service said.

The best chance of widespread precipitation will be Sunday night and Monday, forecasters said.

At 5:56 a.m. today, the temperature at McCarran International Airport was 61 degrees. The normal low for today’s date is 47 degrees. The record low was 30 degrees, set in 1955.

Around the valley just before 6 a.m., temperatures were 60 degrees at North Las Vegas Airport, 60 degrees at Nellis Air Force Base and 55 degrees at Henderson Executive Airport.

Temperatures in the valley were to rise today to 67 degrees by 9 a.m., to 71 degrees by noon and reach a high of 72 degrees by 1 p.m., forecasters said. The normal high for today’s date is 70 degrees and the record high was 91 degrees, set in 2007.

Temperatures are expected to drop to 70 degrees by 6 p.m., to 62 degrees by 9 p.m. and to 55 degrees by midnight, forecasters said.

Friday’s morning low will be 51 degrees and Friday’s high will climb to 74 degrees, they said.

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