OK, so I was browsing along the net a few days ago and came across the $20 Sandwich trick web page which pretty much tells you how to get a free room upgrade when you arrive at check in at select hotels in the Las Vegas area.

Basically you grease the front desk staff by placing a $20 between your ID and your CC when you hand it to the front desk clerk and they will do their best to see if there are any ‘complimentary upgrades’ available.

On the Front Desk Tip webpage there are some pretty good stories I would suggest you take a read for yourself and you might have found the best $20 you can spend on your next trip to Las Vegas.   I’m sure this trick has been around for a long time and I’m definitely going to see if it works on my next trip to Vegas in April 09.  Until then, just monitor people’s success rate on the Front Page Tip web page.

**Update**

I just got home from my 7 nights in Vegas and during that time we stayed at 3 different hotels.  I only wanted to try to $20 trick at the Excalibur because I had purposely booked a crappy low-end room hoping that I could simply slip the desk clerk a $20 a get upgraded to the new flat screen rooms.

So there I was waiting in line, getting the $20 all nicely folded between my license and my CC.  I walk up to the desk clerk, a middle aged women named Remosa or something hand her the $20 sandwich and made small talk,  asking her in there were any upgrades available to the nice Flat screen rooms.  She takes my CC, starts typing away into the computer not even recognizing the $20 bill sitting in front of her.  She goes on to tell me the rooms are $30/night extra to upgrade and I ask if there is anything she can do for us and basically the best she could do was an old crappy room with a decent view.  We at least had a strip view in a medieval styled room.

So after she books us into the crap room, she then bills us a $5/day ‘resort’ fee and asks to take it from my $20 or the CC sitting in front of her.  I tell her to take it from the $20 and then I don’t bother tipping her at all because I don’t think she even understands the concept or she would have made a quick 3 hours salary in about 3 minutes by trying to help me out.

My standard room and failed attempt at $20 Sandiwch Trick @ Excalibur

Oh well, back to the drawing board.  I guess I’ll try this trick next time at a hotel where the desk clerks are used to being tipped.

Cheers,

Alfie11

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I was just reviewing my travel reservations that I printed out back in March about 5 weeks ago and was looking at my rental car since that is the first reservation slip I’ll need once I land on Wednesday morning.

I pre-paid for my rental car with Alamo based on my experience with them last year and because they have a Canadian currency converter on their page (Wake up Travelocity).  The cheapest car to rent was a premium car which could be a Buick Lucerne or similar….please give me a similar I want something a little more sporty than a Buick.  Anyways I prepaid for this car for 8 days and it costs $247USD or $306CDN.  I went back to the Alamo website today to see how much the same booking would cost and found that they aren’t even offering premium cars anymore, but I could have booked a regular size SUV for $211USD or $255CDN.  I hope they don’t have any premium class cars when we show up and let us take a SUV, that’s what happened on our first trip to vegas last year.

We had a midsized booked (Pontiac G6)  but my buddy sweet talked the counter clerk and he upgraded up to SUV (Jeep Patriot) for free since they were out of midsized cars.  By the looks of it Alamo has too many SUV’s available that’s why they are low balling them off at the last minute.

I don’t want to jump the gun but if history repeats itself I’ll be hitting the road in a stylin’ SUV once I get off the plane

Vegas Rental SUV

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Here is a great site that provides a list of all the player’s club sign up bonuses that are being offered at various Vegas casinos and resorts.

Glad I found this list, I’ll be there in 5 days to test it out.

Alfie11

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I’m going to write about how I planned my trip for my week in Vegas and how I ended up booking each hotel, flight, car rental, shows, etc….

Booking my Flight – Booked with Westjet on March 18th for April 29th departure

So my first tip of the day would be how to stretch a 7 day trip into an 8 day trip.  I’m only paying for 7 nights in the hotel and actually going to be traveling for 8 days.  I’ve got my departure flight into Vegas leaving Ottawa, Canada at 7:00am EST arriving in Vegas around 11:30AM PST (7:30 travel time) with a transfer in Toronto, ON.  On the return flight I don’t actually leave Vegas until 11:30pm PST on the following Wednesday May 6; arriving back in Ottawa, Canada around 10:00am EST the following morning.   This soft of gives me an extra day in Vegas (Wed May 6th) because I can checkout of the hotel around 11am, leave my luggage in the rental car and go enjoy my last day in Vegas while I wait for my late night flight back home.

I also found that it was cheaper to fly out on a Wednesday and fly home on a Wednesday as well.  I booked the flight directly with Westjet because my friend had a credit for a free flight, and I was able to get a return flight for $475CDN which is a pretty good price for a return ticket from Ottawa-Las Vegas.

The secret here was to sign up for the Westjet email newsletter and wait for the days when the flights go on sale.  I was able to save $75 on my flight when the seat prices had a 2-day sale exactly 6 weeks from my departure date.

Westjet Flight to Vegas

So now that I’ve got a flight, I need to book some wheels and a place to stay when I get there.

Coming up next……Booking hotels for my Vegas trip.

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