7 Days in Vegas » Vegas Trip Planning

Things I Want To Do On My Next Vegas Trip

Alfie11 — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 02:27:56 +0000

I still feel like a rookie when it comes to Vegas, I’ve been there twice now, for a week each time and I feel like I’ve only experienced maybe 10-20% of what Vegas has to offer.

As luck would have it, I get another chance to visit and cross a few more items off my Vegas to-do list.

On that list:

Play in the 7pm No limit poker tournament at Venetian.
Visit M Resort – didn’t know about this place until recently, reviews look good, might take the drive down the highway to check it out.
Bellagio buffet – Heading there on the first day for the lunch buffet, can’t wait!
Rent a Harley for the day – This is on my to-do list, it costs a lot so we’ll see how we do at the tables first.

UPDATE – April 27th

Only 10 days to go till Vegas, I’m starting to get more exciting each day especially with the weather here today in Ottawa.

Some more items have been added to my to do list including:

Dinner at Vic and Anthonys
3 rounds of golf
Outlet mall shopping
Vinnie Favorito comedy show

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Countdown to Vegas 3 Days….Planning My Vegas Trip Part 3 – Booking the Car

Alfie11 — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:54:45 +0000

So the pre-trip excitement levels are starting to rise and when I was reviewing my car rental agreement I came across something that really burns me up. Paying more than I need to for my trip. Let me explain….

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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Countdown to Vegas – 6 Days…Planning my Vegas Trip Part 2 – Booking Hotels

Alfie11 — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 05:58:41 +0000

Well the time is getting closer and closer and now I’m less than a week away from Las Vegas. I can almost taste the Bellagio buffet and the poker rooms. At this point I think I’ve spent more hours planning and researching my trip than I’ll actually be spending there.

I’m arriving in Vegas on April 29th at 11:30AM PST and I’ll be there Until May 6 11:55pm PST giving me around 180 Hours in Vegas from arrival until departure. By taking an early morning flight into Vegas and a late night flight out of Vegas I was able to add an additional 12 hours to my 7 night Vegas trip.

In this post I want to talk about the planning that went into my hotel bookings. I spent hours and hours in the forums at Better Bidding trying to find out the best time to bid on a trip using Hotwire or Priceline. The only thing I didn’t like about Hotwire or Priceline was that you couldn’t see what hotel you were paying for until after you make the payment. Based on the Better Bidding forums you can decipher the information on Hotwire or Priceline to get an idea of the hotel you are bidding on but you aren’t guaranteed until you make payment.

In the end, I used expedia to book my hotels because I was constantly monitoring the prices and managed to get deals by booking at 3 different hotels for the 7 nights we are staying in Vegas.

The reason we did this was to cover all the prime areas of the strip and keep it within budget. When you are booking hotels for Vegas my advice is to look for deals around 5-6 weeks before your travel date. This is when the hotels were offering their best prices and generally the prices go up the closer you are to your travel date.

The 3 hotel deals we booked on Expedia:

Wed/Thu – Planet Hollywood – 2 nights $220CDN ($180USD or $90USD/night)

Fri/Sat – South Point – 2 nights $216CDN ($177USD or $89USD/night)

Sun/Mon/Tue – Excalibur – 3 nights $166CDN ($136USD or $45USD/night)

Total for all 7 nights – $602CDN ($495USD or $70/night)

The key to getting the low weekly price was staying off-strip for Fri/Sat nights. To stay at PH or Excalibur for Fri/Sat nights would have costs anywhere from $150-$400USD/night which would cut deep into our gambling and entertainment budget. So we decided to save some money and stay off strip at South Point for two nights. It works out because we have a rental car and it won’t be a problem driving anywhere we need to go.

We’ll still get 5 nights on the strip and plenty of time to explore all the places we missed on our first trip.

Can’t wait to be there,

Alfie11

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