Luxor/Cosmo/PH/Wynn: 6 days of fun and winning! March 1-7

First things first, so you can run away while you still can... I love giving lots of small, sometimes insignificant details and posting lots of pictures! I really enjoy writing and putting these details down in text helps me if I need to recall them later on. I am going to make a separate post for each day.


Pre-Trip:





This was a birthday trip with my mom and myself. We went to Vegas last year and the last time she had been to Vegas prior to that was about 35 years ago when you could cross the street normally lol. We still had a lot of places we didn't get to visit from last year and several friends were going to be there as well.



We were looking to take advantage of any deals/free offers/etc to give us more money for entertainment. Flights were $350 per person RT with Southwest, which was fine. We paid a little under $300 last year around the same time, but since then Southwest has moved to only having direct flights on Saturdays and Sundays, and I don't particularly like flying, so I kind of insisted that we do a Sunday-Saturday trip to avoid connecting flights even though it was a day or two longer than we anticipated on staying.



I am 99% a slots and VP player and lowroll most of the time but managed to get decent offers. I had a comped Luxor One Bedroom Tower Suite for Sunday-Wednesday with $40 free play and $50 food credit, paying resort fees only. Somehow, through putting a $20 through 1 machine at Flamingo for 15 minutes last trip, I had a comped room at Paris with an Eiffel Tower view from Sunday-Thursday that I had booked for Mom.



But a few days before the trip, one of my friends who was going to be there, who has Diamond status, said he would book a room for her since he was staying elsewhere so she would not have to pay any resort fees as long as she was ok with it being at Planet Hollywood. She was, and the change was made.



For my own Thursday hotel accomodations I booked a Terrace Studio room for $99 + resort fee (so about $150 total). I really wanted to try a Cosmo room after seeing a friend's so paying for it was not a problem thanks to the other nights being comped.


And for our last night, Friday, I booked a 2 double bed room from Wynn for free thanks to their app. Not technically free since I did have to pay $100 to level up enough in the app to make the booking, but for a Friday night that I had comped nowhere else and no resort fees, it was clearly the best choice to make!





We tried not to make too many plans in advance because so many of them last year ended up not happening, so the only things we really planned were going downtown Monday during the day, a birthday dinner for me Monday night, a tour of the Scientific Games showroom Tuesday, tickets for Cirque du Soleil O on Wednesday ($150 each, center middle section as recommended by a thread on this forum), and Mom wanted to see Barry Manilow at Westgate on Thursday, so we got balcony seats for that for $90 each.


I also wanted to collect all the free play available to me, which was 3x $25 MyKonami free play awards (Bellagio, Aria, Mandalay Bay), and you also get $20 from Luxor, $25 from Park MGM, and $20 from Excalibur for visiting within a certain amount of time of your birthday. So I planned on stopping in those casinos for that if no other reason.


I was honestly worrying about the flight so much that I didn't really get excited before the trip. It isn't even that I'm scared of flying or crashing, it just has upset my stomach very badly in the past and I wasn't looking forward to that happening again.


Didn't start packing until Saturday afternoon but I'm very basic and didn't need much. 1 outfit for each day of the week, phone chargers/portable batteries, a book for the plane, toiletries, and that was about it. I did not let the cats in my room while I was packing which is why there's no cat luggage pictures! So I tried to make up for it above and here.

 

Adorable cats! Looking forward to reading more

 

Thank you! The gray one in the first picture was from a shelter and the rest were either abandoned or were just living outside. There's a big wooded area right near my apartment complex and sometimes people dump cats here so we feed them and have taken them to get spayed/neutered. We took the black cat, the only girl, to get spayed. The vet recommended we keep the cat inside for 24 hours after the surgery so the anesthesia can wear off so they can fend for themselves outside. So we did that and the next day when my roommate got home the cat followed right behind, in the door, up the stairs and basically adopted us lol. I don't understand how people can be so heartless and just throw animals away so we try to help them when and where we can.

Writing up day 1 now and will post soon!

 

Love your kits

 

Looking forward to your Day 1 postings! All good!

 

Day 1:



Flight was at 2:20 Cleveland time and was scheduled to arrive at 4:30 Vegas time. CLE Hopkins was extremely dead when we arrived around noon. No line at TSA checkpoint, got some food from Shake Shack and waited at the gate. Flight had a little turbulence due to stronger winds in Vegas that day but nothing too bad. Plus my stomach made it through okay! We actually arrived about 45 minutes early and they didn't have a gate for us so we had to taxi around for about 15-20 minutes until there was one. Walking through the plane to the deboarding area is when the excitement really hit me.



First stop was Luxor to check into my room since that was closer to the airport. Took only about 10 minutes to make it through the line and got the 1 bedroom suite, 15-207 in the West Tower. The worker said I had to go to the M Life desk to get my $40 free play added but there were about 15 people in line there so I decided to do that some other time. My mindset is that waiting in a line is never a good idea if it can be avoided. Room looked very nice, couch was comfy but again, we didn't have time to stay and relax.






Made our way to Planet Hollywood and met our friend who had booked the room and already checked in. Mom was very happy with the room! I decided to take one of the keycards anyway even though I didn't plan on using the room at all – this becomes important later on... I decided to leave a couple hundred dollars in the safe in case it was needed so I wouldn't have to go all the way back to Luxor for money.





We were both starving at this point so we decided to cross the street and go have dinner at The Henry at Cosmopolitan. Both of us ending up getting the French Dip sandwich and enjoyed it. At first I thought I might have really liked it due to the extreme hunger but realized no, it was pretty good! The fries were super hot and crispy and the sandwich was nice and tender.





Our friends were doing a group slot pull at Treasure Island but Mom was exhausted from the travel and decided to go back to the room at PH but gave me money to buy into the slot pull for her. There were 7 of us (plus Mom's buy in for 8) who put in $50 each for a total of $400 on the Ultimate Fire Link slot and we managed to triple our money to $1200 where we cashed out $150 per person! Shortly after we decided to do a part 2, same buyin, on Dragon Link which went terribly with only 1 bonus before we busted. We were all saying that my mom did the best of all of us, making money while she was asleep!



One of my favorite slot machines, the Britney Spears slot, was not working at Treasure Island, and it didn't have a blue error code or anything like that – it was just all black like the machine was turned off so I was worried they might be taking it out. Several other slots right around her were in the same state. Found some other slots to play and ended up losing the $50 profit from the group pull plus some more. I had a promotion for $25 free play if I earned 150 points which didn't amount to anything either. No winning slot pictures from this night to share



Decided to Uber back to Luxor around 1 a.m and try to get some sleep. I have trouble sleeping pretty much anywhere that isn't my own bed so I wasn't expecting much and I didn't get it here either. The bed was firm and not really comfortable at all to me. Plus the curtains were the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. I like my room to be DARK when I'm sleeping and this is what I got. I went to bed at a relatively decent time each night, but if you stayed up all night and tried to go to bed when the sun was rising, how could you?

This is the view from when I tried to sleep at 2 am:




This is the view from 7 am:



When I showed a friend the picture he thought it was a joke and there had to be another pair of curtains or something – there wasn't! The living room had the exact same ones. My room was also unfortunately right over the bus loading/unloading zone so there was at times beeping of buses backing up every couple minutes. So after a few hours of struggling to sleep, I woke up ready to start Day 2 by going downtown.

 

Great start. Can't wait to read the rest.

 

good luck man!

 

Awwww cute kitties Wow, one would figure that a *suite* would have a second set of curtains LOL it does look like your mom had the best results - hope that turned around Looking forward to the rest of the TR

 

@ACSCLE Re: the Scientific Games tour, is that a publicly available thing? I'm more than a little curious to tour a slot manufacturer, but I didn't think any of them offered such a service.

 

Day 2:

Slowly got ready for the day. The shower was one of the best parts of the room, water got as hot as you wanted it to be and pressure was good. I still had a few hours before I was supposed to go downtown so I went to explore the Luxor casino for the first time. Tried the new Price is Right slot and got a bonus super quickly and it only paid $2. Thankfully Wheel of Fortune 4D was in a better mood and gave me my first nice win of the trip.







Also had decent bonuses on the new Planet Moolah (first spin bonus!) and Rolling Stones.





Got a text from Mom that she was up and having breakfast at Cafe Hollywood and got the croissant french toast.



She visited downtown last year and wasn't really a fan so she planned on doing some shopping at the Miracle Mile stores and relaxing before we met up for dinner later in the day.



Got an Lyft to The Apothecary Shoppe dispensary (thank you to those on this forum who recommended their edibles)! Had never visited Apothecary before but I liked it. Planet 13 sounds too touristy and crowded compared to what I'm looking for, which is a small but good selection where I don't need to spend hours. Apothecary delivered on all those counts. Arrived there at maybe 9:30 am and was able to go right in and get helped immediately. Their dessert case was beautiful but unfortunately the only item they were sold out of was the one that caught my eye, the chocolate covered brownie bites. I had to “settle” for chocolate cake bites instead as well as a vape cartridge. I believe it cost about $80 total. There were 10 cake bites and the label claimed the testing was about 8.5 mg of THC each. Apothecary Shoppe has their own brand of vape cartridges which were cheaper than others. A little lower in percentage, but I had no complaints.



Made my way back to the room to drop off my purchases and then got a Lyft to downtown. I got a random 25% off Lyft promo from Monday-Tuesday at 11:59 pm and then another one came up Thursday morning, so that was a pleasant surprise. Last year I had a 50% off Lyft promo and the funny thing is I never use it at home, the last time I had used it was during last year's trip. Maybe they know my plans somehow. Even with the promo Lyft and Uber rides ended up being one of the trip's biggest expenses.



Arrived at the El Cortez, met my friend and signed up for a card. He showed me the old coin dropper VP machines which I had never played before and I turned $5 into a $20 plus $20 into $80 on slots there. We planned on casino hopping around though, so we said goodbye to El Cortez fairly quickly.





Next stop was The D. We wanted to see what the new upstairs area was looking like and I was pretty disappointed. Lots of slots we had played last year upstairs were just gone. There was a very limited slot selection, Sigma Derby tucked away in a corner, and bartop VP. I proceeded to lose all my profits from El Cortez at The D with no pictures to show from it, but my friend wanted to try some VP and got this very quickly...



After that I lost one more $20 in slots there and we moved on to Downtown Grand, which he said was always practically empty and it seemed to be that way to me, but my friend said it was the most people he had ever seen in here which is probably not a good sign for their business. Signed up for a player's card and threw a $20 in Lightning Link to earn enough points for the new member free play bonus, and got $5. We entered the deserted high limit room and found some interesting slots in higher denominations. Put in a $20 for Jungle Wild 3 playing less lines for a friend and lost that in about 2 minutes.



There were no attendants, no security, no waitresses, nothing in the high limit area. There was a small mini fridge filled with Fiji waters, cokes, etc. Neither of us knew what it was there for, maybe for the waitresses to get drinks for HL players? It just seemed odd to be right out in the open like that and we would have taken a drink but didn't know what the deal with it was. There weren't any prices or anything either so it's not like the drinks were for sale.



Crossed the street to walk down FSE and I got to see the new lighted display up high during the daytime which was pretty cool.



Next stop was 4 Queens which has a lot of older slots both of us like to play. Sadly this was the morning they had their setback regarding the hackers of their system. All the slot machines were up but if you tried to cash out no tickets would print and went into handpay mode instead so we immediately walked out. Nobody got time for that.



Next stop was Binion's which we had little hope for after seeing the disaster at 4 Queens. Their machines were operating properly and printing tickets, but the Player's Club was unable to print cards and everything was cash only. My friend had free play here to use but I think that was having problems too and that didn't work either. Lost a little more money here with nothing of note.



My friend then invited me to lunch at Main Street Station since he had a lot of comp dollars to use and he said the Triple 7 Pub there had pretty good food. Walked over there and saw the ongoing construction of Circa on the way. I got a pulled pork sandwich with fries, he got a Reuben with sweet potato fries and both of us were happy.




After we ate he played a little Treasure Chest VP with no success and I got to see the beautiful stained glass window as we were leaving.



We were both about done with downtown at this point so I got a Lyft back to Planet Hollywood to meet up with Mom. She had enjoyed her day at the Miracle Mile Shops and bought some gifts for family back home. We decided to cross the street and go gamble at Cosmo for a while. Nothing we were playing here was paying at all and I was down about $200 very quickly. I was also very annoyed because I look a lot younger than I am and I got carded 3 separate times in about an hour for no reason. A waitress asked if we wanted drinks, we said no and THEN she asked me for my ID.



I lost my patience and got a little upset when it happened the third time and she apologized saying that they have to do it. I don't really understand why I only had issues at Cosmo and nowhere else but I'm sure the waitresses don't want to waste their time checking people's ID for no reason either, so I can't get mad at them for just doing their job. So after the 3rd time I was pissed and ready to leave but I saw some wilds waiting on the Wheel of Fortune 4D slot on the way out and Vanna did it!



That got me most of the money back that I had lost but I was still in a bad mood so I left anyway and decided to walk back to Luxor and change for dinner as well as see some sights along the way.







The walk plus the time it took to get back to PH allowed me to get in a better mindset and Mom and I left PH to walk to Paris for my birthday dinner at Mon Ami Gabi!







There ended up being 8 of us and we managed to get a table on the patio with a direct view of the Bellagio Fountains as we ate. It was such a great experience and I would highly recommend it to everyone. I ordered the Classique and got a free profiterole for my birthday, both were delicious.





We then decided to cross the street to see the Bellagio fountain show up close because for some reason it was practically empty while we were having dinner. You could walk right up to the front. So we all did that and enjoyed it. I honestly think fountain view rooms are a little overrated, the music and the atmosphere you get from being right there can't be duplicated by watching from your window.



After the fountain show we all walked to Flamingo to do another group slot pull on Super Multi Progressives – it was absolutely horrible and gave no big wins, no bonus, and no progressives – not even the smallest one. We all split into different directions at this point – some went to Treasure Island, some Venetian, and I went to walk back to PH with Mom because she was ready to sleep, not really knowing what my plans after that would be.



After leaving PH I decided to cross the street, go to Aria, and make my way to Luxor but stopping in every casino along the way. Aria decided to pay quickly on Wheel 4D! The couple gambling next to me were hilarious and kept cussing Vanna out when she gave a bad bonus. Also tried the new Orange is the New Black machine but the bonus I got on that was mediocre so I moved on to Park MGM up about $100 at Aria.




I decided to try Farmville at Park MGM which was disastrous taking my $100 profit and then some with no bonuses. I got this nice hit on Super Lit Vegas which gave me my money back and after that I left for NYNY which I had never stopped in before.





I really liked the casino and atmosphere at NYNY. They had a lot of slots with reasonable max bets so I was able to grind away some decent points here, never really winning or losing a lot. I did see a giant original Walking Dead slot and made a note to come back here to play it because it was about 1:45 am and I was finally getting tired from all the walking so I decided to skip Excalibur's casino and just walk right to Luxor. I wanted to try and get some better sleep this night to be well rested for our tour of the SG showroom Tuesday afternoon.

 

One of my friends set it up and he knows a few people working there that he met at G2E last October. I will ask him if it's something anyone can sign up for and let you know when I hear back.

 

That's quite the action packed day!
I'd advise doing some gambling next to mom for the juju,
and keeping some powder dry for Cosmo, I'm guessing you will love the room, and may not leave the property that night.

 

@ACSCLE first of all happy belated birthday man..and what a nice TR (love the beautiful pics as well)......on the carding i understand its a bit silly but maybe go to security to get a above 21 wristband so you wont be bothered all the time (strange though dealster/pitboss should make waitress aware that they checked you so you shouldnt be bothered ordering drinks)....luxor suite also looks nice(exactly the same of the you tube video the uk couple em and greg shot last month)

 

Great pictures! Thanks for sharing all of this.

 

REALLY great pics. Thanks!

 

Good stuff so far!

Sucks about the multiple ID checking, but that's what has to happen with no areas with an ID checkpoint. I usually get carded about once a Vegas trip at a casino bar, and I am 40 next week! No Vegas though for my birthday though. I was also carded on my last two local casino visits. I have a bad habit of shaving before going to a casino. Lol

 

Enjoying Happy birthday. Nice pics and story

 

I heard back from my friend today. He said he was able to make it happen through the people he knew at SG plus while we were taking the tour, the main designer/guy who was showing us around mentioned that we were lucky timing wise because he lives in Chicago and just happened to be in town at this time, plus there were no events going on as the showroom isn't always open.

We did see other visitors walking around the showroom for a brief period of time as well.

He did say that you can contact them and see if you can set something up. I'm not sure if it would be easier or harder to make happen if it's just you interested in the tour (there were 5 of us when we went), but the worst that can happen is they say no.

 

@ACSCLE I probably won't go to that much trouble, more of a passing curiosity, but I really appreciate you asking. Thanks!