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Tags: Cheap Vegas / Deals / Room Rates / Hotel Rooms / Circus Circus / Tropicana / Hooters / Sahara / Rio Las Vegas / → All Tags

The Five Best Budget Hotel Rooms In Vegas

Sometimes, appearances can be deceptive. When it comes to the rooms, that is. Not the casino. Shudder.

Reader Santony may not agree with this, but we at VegasChatter are all about the bargains. But how do you tell if dealz really are dealz? How to differentiate between a $27 room at Excalibur and a $25 gaffe at Imperial Palace? Should you write off Hooters for being Hooters? And are the Rio “suites” actually places you’d want to set foot in?

Reader, we share your pain, and not just because on our first trip to Vegas we ended up at the Stratosphere. The other week, we were watching the poor souls making their way around IP when we shacked up in the room of hell, and it made us think: wow, if you didn’t know Vegas too well, you’d think that all cheap rooms in this town came with grimy mirrored ceilings and suicidal impulses on the side.

So to save you from popping into CVS for some razor blades, here’s our list of top budget hotel rooms in Vegas. We've shacked up in a lot of dross in order to sift out some goodies. You’re welcome.

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Tags: VegasChatter Reviews / Sahara / Hotel Rooms / Video / Cheap Vegas / → All Tags

For $1, This Room Is Actually Pretty Good

Please excuse the neighbors playing Rihanna

When you book a room at Sahara, you know not to expect much. When you book a room at Sahara for $1, that feeling grows. And when, come midnight, you park your car to check in in a garage like this and then have to walk through an entire casino which smells of stale vomit, you learn to lower your expectations all the way down. So bear in mind, we’re judging this from a low expectations viewpoint.

Check in:

Yes, you really do have to tramp through the entire casino to reach check in, and yes, it really did smell of vomit. But on the plus side, there was no queue at check in, the man was nice, and our room was just next door, in the Tangiers Tower (although to get the full Sahara experience we trekked back to the NASCAR bar to get ourselves a $1 hotdog dinner before we faced the room.

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Tags: Tweet of the Weekend / Twitter / McCarran / Sahara / → All Tags

Tweet of the Weekend: Morning After At McCarran

Many people got trashed in Vegas this weekend, and lots of them told the world about it. So, every Monday (or Tuesday, in today’s case) we’re bringing you our favourite tweet of the weekend. And don’t forget to follow us at @vegaschatter.

We always try to avoid McCarran on a Sunday, but a couple of weeks ago we ended up there dropping someone else, and found watching all the broken people trying to make their way home pretty addictive.

So we’re feeling comedian @johnwessling when he said this morning:

This Vegas airport is a walk of shame hall of fame.

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Tags: Snapshot / Sahara / Cheap Vegas / Gross Vegas / → All Tags

This is What a $1 Room Looks Like At Sahara

A properly made bed will cost you at least $2.

Guess the hotel we stayed in last night! It had a car park straight out of a slasher movie, the casino stank of vomit, and we had to sniff the bed to check whether the lack of comforter and un-tucked sheets meant it was unmade, or just made with the kind of care you’d expect in a room that cost $1.

The answer? It smelled alright, and we spied no stray hairs, so we think hope it was the latter, and will be putting our clothes on a boilwash later to be on the safe side.

Yes chaps, last night was the night of our $1 Sahara stay (we went the whole hog and dined on $1 Sahara hot dogs, too, just to heighten the experience). Full review to come very soon. For now, we just thought we’d let you know we’re alive.

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Tags: Deals / Room Rates / Cheap Vegas / Sahara / Gross Vegas / → All Tags

You've Got Till Tomorrow To Book Your (Real) $1 Room At Sahara

Wow, turns out those $1 rooms at Sahara were for realz! We never doubted you for a minute guys, honest, even if your crashing website has been a bloody shambles.

In case you missed it on Twitter, the sale’s on right now and lasts until 10am tomorrow. Technically, the link to click is here but on our computer it would take ages to load and then display an error message, and from what people were telling us on Twitter, they were having the same problems.

After an hour of trying online, we called the hotel (702.737.2654) and held for 20 minutes to find that they aretaking bookings for the $1 rooms over the phone. They don’t have a list of available dates, though, so you have to fire dates at them and they’ll tell you whether they’re free or not.

From our call (30 minutes ago) tonight was still free, as well as a couple of nights in the first week of June. That’s as far as we went, though, because the lady was getting irritable and asking, when we asked how grotty the rooms were, whether we’d ever stayed in a hotel before. Yes, Mary, yes we have. We’re just scared of ending up in this, even for a buck.

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Tags: Deals / Room Rates / Cheap Vegas / Sahara / → All Tags

Stay Tuned For Sahara's $1 Room Deals

$27 rooms at Excalibur? Pah. $24 at Circus Circus? Forget it (actually, after our trip there last week, we kinda wish we could).

What we’re trying to say is that these deals are nuffink compared to what the Sahara is coming up with. According to the press release:

To launch its Twitter and Facebook accounts, Sahara Hotel & Casino will offer $1 room rates during random 24 hour periods throughout the year. Beginning in May 2010, Sahara will give notice of the special offer only through its Twitter and Facebook accounts and will provide followers with a special reservation offer code and unique booking link.

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Tags: Snapshot / Sahara / Do Not Do / Gross Vegas / Twitter / → All Tags

A Balcony Suite At Sahara: No Balcony, But An Extra TV

And there we were thinking the rooms we’ve had lately were bad eggs - until we saw this Twitter update from @nodarkness:

The most ghetto fabulous suite ever? My #VegasSahara balcony suite has no balcony, but TVs stacked up high. Wow...

Think this is real? We haven’t been in a Sahara room so we can’t check the decor, but our tipster reckons it can’t be, because “Sahara only has the remodeled Tangiers Tower open”. The website, though, is selling rooms in the “original Tunis Tower” so we’re going to err on the side of disgust and assume it’s not a wind up.

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Tags: Gambling / Cheap Vegas / Sahara / Westin Casuarina / Blackjack / Roulette / → All Tags

Practice With Your Monkey For a Dollar At The Sahara

Practice makes perfect. Bring your A game, son. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. All “words of wisdom” we’ve been hearing since Little League. But do these quotes that still make us want to punch our middle aged, balding alcoholic coach motivating gems apply in Vegas?

After all, gambling here can be an expensive field to run drills on if you aren’t already at your A game. Luckily there are some cheap spots where you can practice yelling monkey without blowing the budget. ("Monkey" is apparently what players yell when they want a face card dealt. We’re suspicious that it may just be an accepted way to throw veiled swears at the table. But either way it’s a lot of fun to scream. Hence, it should be practiced. Often.)

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Tags: VegasChatter Reviews / Cheap Vegas / Food / Bars / Sahara / Gross Vegas / → All Tags

The Sahara's $1 Hot Dogs: Bargain or Unbearable?

Every time we drive past the Sahara, we keep seeing the Dollar Days sign with its ads for $1 beers, shots and hot dogs. We’ve kept meaning to check it out, but keep chickening out instead. So this week we thought it was high time to psych ourselves up and hit it.

We tried to get our dog at the main bar, which seemed fine (that is, if you keep your eye on the decor, not the clientele), but you can only get the $1 beer there. Instead, for the meat, we were directed to the bar by the Nascar Café at the back of the casino.

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Tags: Closings / Sahara / Hotel Woes / → All Tags

Just in Time for Christmas, The Sahara Closes Most of its Rooms

With midweek rates as low as $30 at the moment, you’d think the Sahara would be getting some budget action, but it appears not to be the case. Last week, they closed the buffet because of “shrinking sales” (probably a good thing, according to most of the victims folk on TripAdvisor. And yesterday, the hotel announced that it would be closing two towers for December. And seeing as it only has three of them, it doesn’t look good.

The hotel hasn’t made any announcement to whether job cuts would be made, but neither have they given any hints at when the towers may reopen or the buffet start up again. TripAdvisor’s kind of working against the hotel itself at the moment too, with mentions of weird-smelling rooms and a few bedbugs.

The glass-half-full side of us thinks that maybe if they concentrate their efforts on the one remaining tower, they can turn things around and make this into a chic SLS Hotel as has been long promised. But the pessimist in us says this could be the beginning of the end. We’ll keep you posted.

Tags: Labor Day Weekend / The Plaza / Four Queens / Circus Circus / Wynn / Imperial Palace / Trump Las Vegas / Sahara / → All Tags

Labor Day Insanity: Downtown Is Still The Cheapest

It’s no surprise that rooms are still available for this Labor Day Weekend. But if you plan to make Las Vegas your end-of-summer, last-hurrah destination, you’d do well to book now as room rates are creeping up.

That’s true especially among the middle- and lower-tier properties around town. According to Expedia.com, you can still get a smokin’ deal at properties downtown (average room rate at the The Plaza for the weekend is $45 per night; the El Cortez is $51 per night and the Four Queens is $74 per night), but some of the less desirable places on the Strip have shot up past the $100-per-night mark. Circus Circus alone stands below that benchmark at a reasonable $96 per night for the three-day weekend, while places like Excalibur are going for $124, Imperial Palace for $127 and Sahara for $112.

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Tags: Show Openings / Entertainment / Sahara / Rick Thomas / → All Tags

Rick Thomas Brings Old-School Magic to The Sahara

Known a few years back for his afternoon shows at the Tropicana and the late, great Stardust, magician Rick Thomas is now launching an ongoing gig at the Sahara.

Thomas, who bears a passing resemblance to erstwhile Vegas performer David Hasselhoff (he starred, somewhat preposterously, as the flamboyant director in "The Producers" at Paris a couple of years back), is known for his magic act celebrating old-school Vegas glam, featuring dancing showgirls, white tigers… the whole bit. People who like that sort of thing tended to be "pleasantly surprised" by how much they enjoyed his particular show – likely because he’s not exactly a renowned name outside of Vegas.

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