LAS VEGAS – Everybody's coming to Las Vegas: A record 41 million people flew in last year. Most visitors know what's rightfully atop their to-do lists: Bellagio's fountains! The Venetian's gondolas! Cirque du Soleil! The new and improved Forum Shops!
Yet Vegas is loaded with bad choices, too. Since the average visitor pops in for a quick weekend, making wrong turns can be a huge waste of time and money. And nothing is more shameful than wasting money in Vegas that could instead be fed into the hungry mouths of slot machines.
Thus, what follows is a fair warning. These are one longtime resident's highly opinionated picks for Vegas' seven worst mistakes – and what outrageously underrated activity to pursue in their places.
Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based freelance writer. Hear more of his critiques as well as insider news and in-depth interviews with top Vegas personalities on his weekly podcast, "The Strip," found at www.thestrippodcast.com.
1. Views from the top
Avoid: The Stratosphere (2000 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-380-7777). People go here because it's somewhat obvious and because the sole raison d'être of this Seattle Space Needle rip-off ($10) is to provide a bird's-eye view of the city. Trouble is, it's expensive, the waits can be excruciatingly long at peak times and there are several better vantage points on the Strip. The revolving Top of the World restaurant is a costly debacle, too, with dull food and an even more boring view of flat terrain for much of the hour it takes to go around. The tower does have one thing going for it: The thrill rides are the city's terrifying best.
Instead try: Mix, at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay (3950 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-632-7777). This new bar-lounge at the Strip's other end gives you everything you can see from the Stratosphere, except closer up. Plus, its $750,000 chandelier made of 13,000 pieces of blown glass is a spectacle in itself, as are the ladies' toilets and men's urinals that stare right out over the skyline. What's more, it's free before 10 o'clock every night ($20 cover thereafter, $25 on Fridays and Saturdays).
2. Romantic getaways
Avoid: The Casino Gold deal at the Imperial Palace (3535 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-731-3311). The IP thrives mainly because of its center-Strip location, but that's no excuse for blowing $85 a night for a weekend of tramping through an obnoxious casino with a section where cards are dealt by low-rent Elvis and Michael Jackson impersonators.
The Casino Gold package, which wisely replaces the notoriously horrific room-of-mirrors-everywhere Luv Tub offerings of years past, includes a gym day pass that's invalid on Fridays and Saturdays, passes to a squalid buffet that are invalid for dinner and a why-bother $5 blackjack match-play. Granted, the newly updated deluxe rooms are more palatable and the free passes to the auto collection are worth a half-hour of fun. But the sooner Harrah's implodes this monstrosity, the better.
Instead try: Platinum Hotel-Lounge-Spa (211 E. Flamingo Road; 877-211-9211; www.theplatinumhotel.com). OK, so there's no package deal available at the moment, but the soon-to-open Platinum is a luxurious nongaming hotel-condo with a killer $129-a-night special rate for a sleek one-bedroom suite on any night including weekends from now until Dec. 22, with just a few blackout dates. (The hotel expects to open by mid-October.)
These sleek 900-square-foot rooms offer sensational sidelong views of the Strip or the eastern mountains from a lovely private balcony, plus full gourmet kitchens and whirlpool tubs – all perfect ingredients for a do-it-yourself romantic experience. And if you need help, the spa has a pair of twosome therapies, including the Daybreak deal in which couples start the day swilling Zentinis (made with green tea vodka), soak in a steam bath and have side-by-side massages. What's more, the location's at least as good as the IP's, a safe two-block walk from the corner of Flamingo and the Strip. Plus, the place has Wi-Fi – which wouldn't seem impressive except that very few Vegas properties have it, not even the newest megaresort, the Wynn – and MP3 player docking stations.
3. Food
Avoid: Bouchon (at the Venetian, 3355 Las Vegas Blvd. S., 702-414-6200). Hopes were high for this bistro from famed chef Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame. But the food is merely average at best, the atmosphere is distractingly noisy and the service was hands-down the worst we've ever endured. Sadly, that's actually what we expected from what others had said about it.
Instead try: Restaurant RM (At Mandalay Bay, 3930 Las Vegas Blvd. S., 702-795-7155). Chef Rick Moonen closed his successful and acclaimed New York seafoodery to head to the desert, a gamble indeed in a town where most tourists are programmed to want a good steak. The result is extraordinary, a restaurant that serves, by far, the best and freshest of the sea, flown in daily. What's more, in this day and age of absentee star chefs, it is refreshing to know that if you ask to speak to Mr. Moonen, he's almost always in residence and happy to say hello.
4. Free attractions
Avoid: The Sirens of T.I. at Treasure Island (3300 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-894-7111). This is the recently revamped version of what was a wholesome and mildly entertaining pirate show, all sexed up with hot chicks to fit the "what happens here stays here" edition of Las Vegas. Trouble is, the 15-minute show (presented at 5:30, 7, 8:30 and 10 p.m.) is dumb and a major pain to watch. In order to see anything at all, you have to stand outside the Buccaneer Bay at least 20 minutes ahead of time, and still there is simply no vantage point at which to take in the whole thing.
Instead try: The Fremont Street Experience (Fremont Street, 702-678-5777, www.vegas experience.com). Yes, it's downtown, which loses points with lots of Vegas-goers. But aside from the Bellagio's fountains, the best free spectacle in town is the astonishing and clever light show (on the hour after dark until midnight) projected from the underside of a four-block-long metal canopy that arches over a pedestrian mall. The Experience recently enjoyed a $17 million upgrade, making it the largest LED display in the world.
5. Spectacle shows
Avoid: Le Reve (at the Wynn Las Vegas, 3131 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-770- 7000). When it opened last year, this show held a great deal of promise because of its remarkable pedigree as the creation of Cirque du Soleil alum Franco Dragone, who divined O, Mystere and Celine Dion's show.
Steve Wynn owns the Picasso painting that gave the show its name and was the working title of the resort itself until 2004. Mr. Wynn even built Mr. Dragone a spectacular $100 million aquatic theater-in-the-round and priced it as the most expensive minimum-price show ticket in town at $88 plus tax.
Sadly, Le Reve is a tragic case of technology overtaking and driving a performance and stifling Mr. Dragone's ability to make dramatic changes once it was open.
The acrobatics are redundant, the abstract story uninteresting and the attempts at humor can be interpreted as homophobic. Recently, Mr. Wynn fired (or "bought out" in business parlance) Mr. Dragone and is planning an overhaul, but until that is done around year's end, there are better ways to spend $100.
Instead try: Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular. (At the Venetian; 877-883-6423). The hype surrounding the Broadway-to-Vegas migration has subsided now that Avenue Q, We Will Rock You, Forbidden Vegas and Hairspray all fizzled, and hopes aren't high for The Producers opening at Paris this fall. But the Venetian's 95-minute version of the most successful musical ever staged looks likely to endure because it does something the others failed to do: It provides enough pyrotechnics and special effects in its $40 million custom-built theater to make it worthwhile for people who have seen it elsewhere to go again.
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and original director Hal Prince both had their hands on this, so don't feel like you're getting something less than a work of art. Prepare for a chandelier-crashing scene that turns a beloved theatrical moment into something befitting the razzle-dazzle of its new city.
6. Wildlife attractions
Avoid: Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden (at the Mirage, 3400 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-791-7111). Why pay good money ($12, though that includes entry to Dolphin Habitat; kids under 10 free) to listen to an audio tour voiced by the now-defunct illusionist duo rambling on about what great conservationists they are. Sure, you get to see the trademark royal white tigers they once used in their show, but it's hard to forget that the reason they don't do a show anymore is because one of these cuddly cats went haywire in 2003 and snacked on Roy's neck. Despite the zoo's effort to present realism, there's no note at all of that incident, and it's a bit of a touchy subject when you broach it with the animal handlers.
Instead try: The Wildlife Habitat (at the Flamingo Las Vegas, 3555 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 702-733-3111). Enjoy the lighthearted antics of the pink Chilean flamingos as they flop around leisurely on islands amid tranquil waterfalls along with Australian black swans, helmeted guinea fowl and various ducks. The two islands are surrounded by fresh water where colorful koi swim along with 25-pound green-gray grass carp and yellow albino channel catfish for folks to gawk at from footbridges. And it's free.
7. Headliners
Avoid: Celine Dion's A New Day ... (Caesars Palace, 3570 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 877-423- 5463). It's not that it's a terrible show. Well, it was when it opened in 2003, but it's refined itself since then, and Celine looks better and chest-thumps less. But her music is so relaxing that it fails to deliver the jolt of energy Vegas theater is supposed to give. Celine's also such a good singer that it sounds flawlessly like her albums, which most of the audience already owns. Watching Celine sing her songs (for $87.50 plus tax, and up) is a strange letdown because you realize that she of the perfect marriage and motherhood has no idea what the sort of sadness and desperation of "I Drove All Night" or "It's All Coming Back to Me" feels like.
Instead try: Rita Rudner (Harrah's Las Vegas, 3475 Las Vegas Blvd. S.; 800-392-9002). The deceptively snarky comedienne delivers her sharp-as-tacks relationship humor in a ditzy baby voice guaranteed to force you to guffaw. She lacks the pizazz and sparkle of Cirque, although her girlie-girl prom-dress costumes often look coated in glitter. Her observations are broad and universal enough that she's been packing in crowds for more than five years, a consistency rarely matched in this transient city. In fact, she's moved from her old haunts at the New York-New York to Harrah's Las Vegas, where she opens Oct. 2. (8 p.m., days vary; $49 plus tax)
[an error occurred while processing this directive]