hi,could do with a heads up on should i buy my tobacoo products around the strip, or grab them at the airport before flying back to the uk,just looking to save a few pound
Overall cigarettes are probably cheaper in the USA than they are in the UK... except on The Strip. On The Strip, whether you are going to a casino gift shop, CVS, Walgreens, ABC or using a vending machine you can expect to pay around $8-9 per pack and occasionally finding a "deal" for $7 a pack. The only real deal I found on The Strip was down at the AM/PM across the street from Luxor where you can get them for $3.50-4.00 per pack. Cigars and pipe tobacco are pretty much the same with a high markup on The Strip, but you can't get them just anywhere. Thats for actually when you are in Las Vegas and want to smoke... For going back to the UK: If you are really planning to load up on tobacco products (I believe the UK customs allowance is for 15-16 cartons of cigarettes, a few boxes of cigars, 6-8 lbs of loose tobacco, so you can bring back quite a bit) you might want to just find the nearest Walmart and take a taxi there. Yes, the taxi will cost a bit of money but your overall savings should still make the expense well worth it. And there are duty free shops at the airport where you will probably get some of the better prices, but the selection is really limited for cigarettes and they might not have cigars or other tobacco products.
Hey Auggie – when did you see these prices? Were they for “premium” brands? I know here in VA, our tobacco taxes are one of the lowest in US (I always buy a few packs when I'm leaving the state) and I call it a “win” when I can get a pack of Marlboros for under $5.
When we were there for Halloween last year. Being Canadian I'm not really sure which exactly are premium brands in the US and which are the cheap brands, but IIRC I paid around $11.50 for three packs of Marlboro Gold. As I think about it: they have a bunch of cheap prices for cigarettes on the door - Camel, Kool and Marlboro, as examples, but they were all for buying three packs at a time... so not sure what they charge for a single pack (thats how they do it up here too, IE: at a 7-11 the price you pay for one pack is more than the per pack price for two packs, which is more than the per pack price for three packs).
LOWEST PRICES BY FAR are 1 mile north of downtown on Main Street. Indian tobacco shop on the left has 10-12 brands of generics for $10-$13 A CARTON.
From what I read, there is a duty free shop in Terminal 2 (says near gate 3) that sells tobacco and all the normal duty free items. If you are flying into that terminal, might be worth a stop when you arrive to see how much a carton of cigs goes for, knowing how much you can get them in town.
If your flight arrives at Terminal 2 you can't get access the duty free shop - when you get off the jet it unloads passengers in to a corridor, not the terminal, that takes you to the customs check point. As mentioned above they can check the duty free shop on their way back if they are departing through Terminal 2, but the selection for tobacco there is very limited. Edit to add: At the end of June they will be opening the new Terminal 3 to replace Terminal 2. The set up there might be different, but I presume they still won't let people exit from the plane in to the terminal and instead send them to customs... but if the duty free store gets a bigger retail space they might be able to carry more brands of tobacco and more tobacco products.
