Vegas Building Boom Means Cheap Rooms

Las Vegas is feeling the pinch of slumping travel numbers. The amount of visitors who enter Sin City has dropped by nearly 5%, but the construction of new hotels has led to an increase in rooms. Who to fill them?

Once they get over criticizing themselves for lacking foresight, hotel execs have to find a way to hawk all those empty beds.

The obvious strategy, at least for the short term, is to lower prices until they reach a point where visitors won’t mind shelling out a little extra for the flight because they are getting such a ridiculously cheap deal from the hotel.

How cheap is ridiculously cheap? According to MSNBC, over half the casino-owned hotels in the city are offering rates of $50 per night or below. Yes, that type of price is usually reserved for roadside motels where you can also choose to pay by the hour. Even high end, established names like Luxor and MGM Grand have rooms available for under $100 per night.

However, the famous ad campaign tag-line might be true of hotels as well. What happens in Vegas…isn’t happening elsewhere just yet. Rooms in Chicago, New York and other major metro areas are still at full price. International tourists, convention-goers, and business travelers make up the bulk of New York’s hotel customers. They have other bases to rely on as the number of US-based leisure travelers decline. That is not so in Las Vegas.

Source

Affordable Hotels and B&Bs in Europe

Searching for hotel rooms in Athens and Rome this week, I stumbled upon this website: hotelroom.com.

I could not find any affordable hotels on hotels.com, quickbook.com, expedia, travelocity…and all those usual suspects. On hotelroom.com, however, I was able to find hotels for as little as 30Euro for a double room in Athens. They provide photos, reviews and their cancellation penalties are very forgiving. Plus, the hotels have character. You don’t see chain hotels on the site very often.

I wish I knew about this site years ago!