And I am not just talking about McCarran – the worst bag-handling airport in USA (although it is getting better). What I am talking about is our broken airline business. To make my point, let us discuss a trip to Sin City this Easter (for non-Christians’ this is not a sign of the apocalypse).
When you plan a trip to Vegas you think about the following costs: flights, hotels, meals, drinks and the amount you can afford to loose. Let’s consider the trip at Easter for two (let's say you take the wife!).
Hotels: I am pretty sure you could get two or three free nights in most strip hotels for free but let's do a quick check on hotel.com. For the Friday through Monday you can get the Sahara or another hotel of the same quality (!) for $45 a night on average. Let’s say $150 for three nights.
Meals: Well, you can do three at all-you-can-eat buffets for around $20 a day but let us says you want at least one nice night out (which means $50 per head). That is around $220 including drinks.
Drinking: Done while gambling it is probably free but coffee that morning coffee can cost, so lets budget $30.
So far the trip for two has cost: $400 and you have yet to play a nickel in the slots.
According to Wiki answers, an average player looses $500 on their trip to Vegas. For two that’s $1000. Let’s hope we come out winning but few do. That makes our total trip $1400 so far – and we have not yet booked a flight.
Now flying depends on where you live but I check expedia.com. We live in Austin and with a change of planes its about $270 each on AA. If we go direct on Southwest it is nearer $350 each. Both are pretty unsocial times to fly - if I pick decent times to fly (which I would) on AA they want $750 each. Bad times normally means arriving late on your first day and leaving early on your last - three days become 1 day pretty quickly.
Our $1400 trip has just become $2000 trip at the very least – which less than 50% is gambling.
In reality, we will probably pay $0 for our hotels and stay somewhere nicer. We also will take more money to ‘win’ with and hope to come home with some of it still in our wallets.
Bottom line: what stops us going to LV this Easter is not the gambling, the meals, the drinks or that hotels – it’s the flight prices. Maybe instead of free rooms – the hotels should offer us free flights – although that’s real money to them and they are not getting enough of that.
There is a theory that states we are not taking a quickie weekend in Vegas till the flights sort themselves out.
Lake Charles anyone?
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