Shows and food alone is a killer. Only lost a $20 or $30 total in gambling, just did slots. There's so much stuff to do, so many places to eat, you need at least a solid month and a ton of $$ to cover everything.

I'm glad we had free lodging (parents time share), transportation (shuttle to the strip) and airfare (wedding gift) or else the trip would have been ridiculously expensive

Food was cheap when I went and drinks are free if you are gambling. I was finding all you can eat buffets for $5 a person 3 years ago and the food was great.

Example: At the Harrah's outdoor court where there is a bar, one mixed drink was $7. An equivalent sized drink in downtown Orlando would have been $5. It was mostly alcohol (like 98%) so I'd give them some credit for giving you your moneys worth.

Food wise, you can find all the usual fast food time places. Prices were more expensive in general. I'd probably attribute that to being west side of hte country. Gas was $2.25-2.27 for low grade and high grade was $2.45-2.55. So cost of living was just more in general. For "vegas" food, like the buffet's and restaurants in the hotels you could spend anywhere from $11-19 per person on lunch, add up to $5 for dinner for a buffett and for dinner you could easily spend up to $200 for 2 or more at one of the fancier places. We're talking maneuls on the 28th (emmanuels?) type pricing but there are like 2 or 3 of those priced places in almost every hotel.

If you consider the buffet prices, average $35/two for lunch and $45/two for dinner, you get a lot for the money in variety of food as you could spend that much for 2 in a place like Hops or Outback and only eat one thing. Some of the buffets were worth the costs, others were not.

And there was no $5/person buffets, not any decent ones in any of the megaresorts. The cheapest stuff we saw was $10/person for prime rib dinners and everyone said they were horrible.

You can score a lot of coupons and things and get heavily diso****ed meals and what not, but for food/drinks on the strips. in all the casinos/hotel resorts, nothing was that cheap and we walked through every one except Aladdin and everyone was paying for their drinks.

We stayed a timeshare that my parents own, btw.

Of course, when I went it was a month after 9/11 so maybe it was that cheap because no one wanted to fly at the time and the tourism industry went to the toilet.

The places I went to were the Flamingo Hilton, MGM Grand, New York New York, etc. all had comp drinks and cheap food.

They also prefer to comp guests first before comping outsiders which means you have to flash even more money.

You probably did it the right way; free place to stay and only gamble a little.

That is what gets their attention. Also did you get a players card when you were playing slots? It's the only way you will ever get comps with slots.

everything will be priced way to high so people believe they are getting something better than what they actually are.

So we played in 3 or 4 different hotels and for 1 hour tops. Weren't really looking to get comps, just maybe win a few bucks, or get lucky and win a lot . Mainly it was amusing and it killed time. We only did the nickel slots.

I wanted to play some BlackJack but I got sick Tuesday and was in no mood to sit at tables with people smoking in my face. It was bad enough being in the casinos with all that smoke and being sick.


I really appreciate FL's smoking laws now.

Casinos generally make more money off of slots than table games but they don't have the image that the table does. If a place makes most of it's money off of slots generally they are going to be really loose to keep people on their floor.