Please ADD your own Las Vegas Trip Report. Date of Trip: March 07, 2006 to March 12, 2006 Hotel Stayed At: Hooters Casino Hotel Report by: C <curious1947@hotmail.com> From: Georgia

Departed Atlanta on Air Tran on time at 9:40PM, Tuesday, March 7, 2006 and arrived at McCarren Airport around 11:30 Pacific. My adult son who lives in Las Vegas picked us up. Had the late night special breakfast at Terrible’s casino (pancakes, bacon, and hash browns for $1.86 – not bad!) Head to our hotel, Hooters Casino Hotel. (apparently recently converted from the San Remo hotel, half a block off the strip opposite the MGM).

Arrival Experience

Rather than enter through the front, son parked his car in the adjacent parking garage. There were no signs pointing to the front desk, and we got lucky when we were put into the casino by turning left to find the front desk around the corner (about the last time we had any luck there). Check-in was good, they were expecting us, and all went well until we got our room assignment, room 260 in the Bungalows (a small two story hotel next to the swimming pool. Rather than show us the route to our room on a map, our instructions were to “go through the glass doors (clerk pointing in their general direction, but they are not visible from the front desk) then Room 260 is in the two story building.” There was no bellhop available or offered. As with most casinos, there was no straight path to the exit, but we found them. Went through them, we are standing in the pool area, and there were absolutely no signs to indicate where the entrance to the Bungalows was. We chose one door toward the middle and found that a dead end, then headed to one end of the building. Apparently management has not reviewed their customer arrival experience.

On entering the roped-open door, (what security?) we saw that the first floor was still being worked on, and the stench of rancid cooking oil (that turned out to be carpet glue curing) assaulted our nostrils. The second floor was somewhat better, but not odor free. The room was only partially finished, with no headboard, and one bar stool was used as a nightstand. The other side of the bed had no nightstand. The smoke alarm on the wall had no cover or battery. The bathtub had no stopper to take a bath, the hot and cold handles were reversed (perhaps the worker who put that in thought the C was for “caliente”?), and there was no soap. This room should not have been rented, but it was NASCAR race weekend; evidently management thought it was ok to rent a substandard room to the race hicks.

They have built a waterfall next to the pool. This makes an enclosure of hard walls on all four sides of the pool area. It was being worked on and there were no customers in the area. Our room faced the pool area. For whatever reason, they chose to blare music into the pool area all night. Being on the second floor, our room just absorbed the bass all night. We went back to the front desk about 3AM to complain, but there was no one behind the counter (we waited for about 10 minutes) I was tired enough to sleep, but the wife got very little. The next day we complained to the front desk, and after one more night in that room, we were put into the Towers on the 14th floor.

Our room there was pleasant, with an installed headboard and nightstands. Still no tub stopper, the adjustable showerhead wouldn’t budge from its full on setting, and the table lamp had no light bulb. But it was quiet, and the odor was gone.

False Alarms

Friday morning, Mar 10, at 7:30AM, the fire alarm blared and we got a recorded announcement along the lines of “Warning, our system has detected a problem. Stand by.” This same warning sounded three or four times in the space of five minutes. We dress, don shoes, coats, hats, find camera and wallets. Since we were on the 14th floor, we prepared for a long descent. Our adrenalin was working, as you would expect. . . 45 minutes later, I called the front desk and asked for the status of the alarm, and the operator asked me “What alarm? I haven’t been told anything.” She called back three minutes later and said that it was all clear. No “All Clear” call was ever issued. I found out later that the alarm went out from floors 11 through 19, for approximately 400 rooms.

Later that morning, I sought out management to find out what happened. I met a man, David Router (may have the last name spelled incorrectly, as I didn’t ask for the spelling and workers only wear name tags with their first name) who said he was the on-duty manager. I asked what happened, and he called out Alan. (I found out the next day that this was Alan De Tiberiis, The Director of Hotel Operations.) Alan stated that the fire department had set the alarm and that the hotel management had no control over it. “It’s the fire department’s call, and we can’t do anything about it.” (As I have found out, this was a bald faced lie. This was a problem of Hooters fire detection system.) Why would he lie to me? Because I would be gone over the weekend and I was a problem that would go away. He is corporate slime.

The next morning, at exactly 8:00AM, the same warning sounded. We go through the same routine, only this time there were Hooters security personnel on the floor. One security person told me it was a false alarm. I stressed to him that an “All Clear” needed to be issued, and heard him relay that at about 8:07AM. At 8:17, you could hear someone attempting to make the announcement over the alarm speaker, but they were unsuccessful. Finally, at 8:21AM, the “All Clear” call came over the speaker. As a former Chief of Safety for a USAF flying unit, it was pretty clear to me that there were no procedures that were followed. The entire situation had an air of “what do we do now?” about it.

Other concerns I discovered: The recorded voice with the warning message was only in English. At a minimum, a Spanish warning should also be recorded. (Our maid only spoke Spanish.) In an attempt to get information out, there should be an override to the television channel that every TV starts with (currently used to promote in-house movies). This could provide current information in many languages, and would take the pressure off the front desk answering hundreds of calls.

Other Observations

If you like blackjack, go someplace else to play. They have Modified Single Deck Rules:
· Blackjack pays 6 to 5 [not 7.5 to 5 as is normal with a shoe]
· Can only double on 10 or 11 [normally you can double regardless of your total]
· Aces split only once [with a shoe, you can split as many aces as you receive]
· No doubling after split [you can with a shoe]
Food: We only ate there once. We had a coupon for $40 of food at the Dam restaurant. Most people were ordering burgers or nachos; perhaps we should have followed suit. We had the funds to use, so I ordered a medium rare steak served with potato pancake, and the wife got barbequed chicken. Her order was good, but my steak came out well done, with no pink at all in it, and the cooking also made the meat tough; I left over half of it. The potato pancake was so salty I could only eat about a third of it.

Ambiance: The Hooters girls (they hired over 200 of them) may be nice to look at (nothing revealing with a sleeveless shirt, short orange shorts, fluffy white socks, and tennis shoes), and there is the feeling of being awash in testosterone at a frat house, but the knotty pine décor is about as subtle as this place gets.

Summary

The Hooters Casino Hotel is a third-tier hotel, due to the small size of the casino, and there is no venue to host entertainment; a no-name “dueling pianos” team played in the bar. Is it a first-rate hotel--hardly. The fact that customers in 400 rooms got rousted out of bed at 7:30 and 8:00 on two consecutive days didn’t bother management -- they didn’t lose any sleep, and besides, they already had our money. No, this is a fourth-rate hotel that provided us one of the worst hotel experiences we have ever encountered. And with the leadership of the Director of Hotel Operations, we expect it will descend to fifth-rate status in the near future. Thank God we won’t ever have to suffer it again.

“Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”

C <curious1947@hotmail.com> - Georgia    2910

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