Hello all, I'm looking at using some of my Mlife rewards and British Airways vouchers and go to Vegas in October 2021 with my girlfriend. Providing all this covid malarkey has died down.
I'm thinking :
4 nights in Vegas
6 nights out of Vegas, somewhere scenic ( any ideas)
4 nights in Vegas
The hotels have to be the following.
The Bellagio
MGM Grand
Manderlay Bay
New York New York.
I want to stay in 2 separate hotels for each of the 4 days. I was thinking The Bellagio and Manderlay Bay. Would you say these are the best out of the list? How would you rate them? Finally for the 6 days when we are not in vegas I was thinking of hiring a car and driving to sequoia national park and then on to Yosemite. Is this doable google says it takes 6 hours from Vegas to sequoia and then about 3 hours onwards to Yosemite. Does anyone know any nice places to stay at either?
Thanks in advance
A few random tips, having been there many times and also got married there:
Don't use taxis, there's a coach service called The Deuce which runs up and down the strip every 15 mins, massive comfy air conditioned coaches, last time we were there (2017) it was $10 for a 24h pass. Ride it as much as you want.
Avoid cabs, they
will rip you off. If you land and need to get to your hotel cheaply, do some research and find out where your hotel's shuttle service can be found. No jokes, a cab will turn a 5 mile journey in to a half hour long motorway tour.
You can drink as much as you want when gambling, so we slummed it on the last night and played the penny slots whilst drinking. We also walked out of the casino with more money than we came in with for some reason. I suspect the waitresses are told to hold back the booze a bit as they were quite stingy at first, then we started tipping a few bucks a round and they started getting a lot more generous.
If someone offers you anything, walk away. NOTHING is free on the strip. There's a catch and fine print to
everything. If you hear the words "all we ask is some of your time" or the words "timeshare", run. Run a mile and never look back. It will be the most miserable day of your life. If you want more info on this, I'll write it up, quite a funny and irritating story.
When gambling, the first thing you should do before you drop even a penny on anything is to sign up to whatever loyalty rewards card that casino is offering. You'll mostly get useless tat but we got some shirts, backpacks, water bottles and other junk which I'm sure we have stashed away somewhere.
10 minutes down the strip is the outlet centre, where you can pick up cheap yank clothing. We got genuine Levis on special for $20 a pair. The Deuce will take you here on your 24h pass.
For touristy stuff you definitely want to do the Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam, most tours will also take you on a bit of an Area 51 tour too. For tours, you want a coach. Loads of people go for the helis not realising that to get to the helipad you spend two hours on a coach anyway and the tour is about 10% the length of the coach tour. The tour guides rely on tips and this is reflected in their hospitality, they were all absolutely fantastic. If you do a coach tour, bring your own food and drink. The free lunch they offer is a sandwich, a banana and a juicebox for a whole day, and the shops on the way know this so will rinse you for a can of coke. It's a long day, but a fantastic day out.
For shows, Frank Mourinho's Divas is the funniest thing I have ever seen, I was literally crying with laughter. Criss Angel was good, but very overhyped and it felt commercialised to the point where the show was 20% of the night and the other 80% was trying to get you to buy merch and stuff.
For hotels, stay away from the Stratosphere / Circus Circus end of the strip, it's a dump. Mandalay bay is fantastic and has the best pool parties if you want to go and feel like these twenty somethings all love you until you tell them you're not looking for paid love. Luxor is great and definitely worth a look about too. The MGM Grand is getting on a bit, and since the lions left there's not that much left anymore. We stayed at the Linq last time we were there, which was a brand-new refurbished hotel. Apparently it had a reputation before of being host to many, many questionable activities in the adult world and drug consumption. A few months after getting back, I saw what they meant when I saw the
exact corridor we walked through every day in a porn film. The Aria looks amazing but it's very, very corporate, to the point where we just walked out. I do corporate here in London every day, I go to Vegas for the silliness and shenanigans. I suspect I'd like it more if I was over 60. Out of your hotels, I'd be all over the Mandalay Bay. yes it's at the end of the strip but it's an awesome hotel, there's a free airconditioned monorail which runs every few mins down to the Luxor and then to the Excalibur, you literally just walk in and hop on. It's automated so just runs 24/7.
Make use of the free stuff you get. Many hotels will give you a little voucher of $20 every day to use at Starbucks for example. We ignored it at first thinking it was a hook just like everything else in Vegas until we gave it a shot and had lovely caramel Lattes with cinnamon buns every morning for the rest of our stay.
Other stuff to do are the shooting ranges where you can go full 'Merica and shoot guns, there's off road sandrail stuff, there's tons to do but it's all expensive and most of it is watered down completely.
All the hotels have their little themes and pulls, go enjoy them all, the boat rides at the Venetian, the fountains at the Bellagio, Caesar doing his little thing at Caesar's palace, they're all over the place. Spend an afternoon just walking the strip from top to bottom and enjoying them, it's great.
As you can tell by this post we once spent close to three weeks in Vegas and by the time we were close to the end we were skint as hell (we were 24 at the time) and bored so we found out all the other stuff that the locals do, literally just wasting time.
I'll probably add more later.
I have done a few of the hotels; LINQ, Excalibur, Cosmopolitan, Wynn, Encore, Venetian and had friends staying at the Aria and Bellagio. 
