My wife and I just got back from Vegas. We travelled 9/18-9/21. By far the best trip we have been on and as such I figured I would provide a trip report to give some details that may help someone else enjoy their experience more.
I turned 40 last week and my wife set this trip up as a sort of surprise. We have been to Vegas many times and while we contemplated going to Miami this time (mainly because I think we felt kinda self conscious about going to Vegas on every vacation without our kids, people constantly bust our chops on going out there after every trip; reality is folks think it is immature BUT if they ever tried going with us they would be addicted just like we are) but chose not to do so based off of 1) weather concerns (I.e. Hurricane Season) 2) lack of day clubs 3) advice obtained from this site. I was a little nervous that we would be burned out on Vegas because we just went last summer but we chose to do it again anyway.
My wife set the following club gauntlet for us mainly due to DJ's in question:
Friday (9/18) Surrender (Lil Jon)
Saturday (9/19) EBC (Guetta)
Saturday (9/19) Marquee (Bennassi)
Sunday (9/20) EBC (Zedd) (we ate tickets for wet, EBC was too good to pass up)
Sunday (9/20) XS Nightswim (R L Greime)
Based on where we were planning on spending our time we decided to stay at the Wynn. We bought tickets to all of the Wynn Venues thru the concierge, which in some cases seemed only slightly marked up and in others they seemed incredibly marked up from the online price, all in all these tickets worked out very well, I will get into that more later but I think they were worth it.
We arrived in Vegas Friday around 6:00pm. We were both awake at 6:30am EST and could not sleep on the plane. This all made me worried because we had big plans and starting off far in sleep deficit land seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.
Because we were flying in on a Friday evening I was worried that the cab line would be out of control so I opted to have a Sedan from the concierge pick us up, cost was around 80 after tip so while more expensive than a cab a good way to start out.
Get to the Wynn, no wait for check in. The employee checking us in offered us a $30/night upgrade for a panoramic view room, I passed because we were basically using the room as a locker. Turns out we ended up with a great view anyway, one thing about this, our room was facing fashion show mall, this was key in the morning As no morning sun seemed to bother us.
I was not fond of the restaurant options in the Wynn/encore, nothing fast and the nice options were not really appealing for some reason. We end up eating at Wazuzu which was good, we should have probably went all out for a nicer dinner Friday because we ended up needing to cancel our Saturday and Sunday reservations because of our waking up late from the day clubs. Wazuzu did have a interesting mix of folk inside, which I guess the encore always did; a mix of people who just had spent the day at EBC and older couples. The drinks at Wazuzu were good/strong and about the same if not less than in the clubs.
We end up finishing dinner around 9:30 and head to one of the hotel bars to have a few drinks before heading into Surrender. This was a good move because it kept my wife's feet from being tired and we got to pregame.
There was a line but nothing tragic, nevertheless we are told because we have the concierge tickets that we should go directly to the side of the front door and they would let us in, worked well.
By this point it was around 11, we walk in and the club is empty. So we head to the pool bar portion to continue to drink, for the record they did let my wife sit on a couch without bottle service and they did give me free water with all drinks. Not much of a wait for the drinks at the bar, but not much love for my heavy tipping either. Pretty much immediately my wife wants to dance which is a bit of a problem because the place is still a little empty and (largely due to the fact that we were drinking already for 3 hours) I think we were being the most rowdy people there at that point. Things fill up pretty quickly around midnight, if I were trying to save money I could have easily pregamed until 12 and came down and got right in with the tickets.
So the decision on where to go Friday was a hard one. We really wanted to go to Drai's mainly because we love that venue but they had a concert which would not be our thing (we watched some YouTube stuff of the same artist there and we did not think that it would be our scene). We ruled out Hak because everything we read here said GA there was a disaster. We ruled out XS because Guetta was there and we did not want to go back to back. Marquee was on our agenda for Saturday. I have been to light and did not like it which left us with Omnia Or Surrender, I am sad to say that Wynncore's persistent lambasting of The GA experience at Omnia on seemingly every thread during the weeks leading up to this trip had worn me down (the picture of the big guy on the stretcher was the straw that broke the camels back, hits too close to home). So we checked out some you tube stuff of lil Jon and it looked like it would be fun.
Although Surrender is small we were able to access the dance floor anytime we wanted and the place was fairly full. I liked the place, fun vibe and nice outside feature allowing you to sit down if you wanted to. You could easily talk outside and then go back inside to get nuts.
One disadvantage of Surrender is the bathroom situation, why would they only have one opened up? There was a 30 person line for the men's room!! Makes no sense. My wife figured out early on that you could leave surrender, walk to the right out in the casino like 5 steps and access an empty casino bathroom and get immediate re-entry.
Lil Jon came on around 1-1:30. He put on a fun set, not just playing his music he played a good mix of stuff and while not more impressive than Guetta or Zedd he was better than anyone else we saw on this or any other trip.
My wife always seems to gravitate to the front at all of these places so we were right to the left of the stage when he played his shots song so of course he sends shots down for the girls in the first row, my wife gets given one by one of his guys; it was red and she said it tasted like cough syrup, she almost threw up and it was hilarious. I will never be able to attend a football game again and not think of that when his music comes on. Really great night.
Lil Jon went off stage around 3-3:30, we were up for 24 hours and drinking very hard for the last 6 at that point. I could feel myself blacking out (I had converted to shots at some point which was better logistically but in retrospect playing with fire), so other than the evidence of the time stamp on some random picture of my wife near those moraccas on the path to the Wynn taken at 3:45am I have no idea how or when we got home. My wife remembered little as well BUT she did remember forcing us to drink the coconut water I had stocked the room (I have never been so happy to see an empty bottle in the trash the next morning), such a good woman, for the first time of many this trip she saved the day.
Hope this is not too detailed or boring and I hope it gives some good info for folks. At some point I'll type out Saturday which was by far the funnest day ever (well Sunday was close)!
I turned 40 last week and my wife set this trip up as a sort of surprise. We have been to Vegas many times and while we contemplated going to Miami this time (mainly because I think we felt kinda self conscious about going to Vegas on every vacation without our kids, people constantly bust our chops on going out there after every trip; reality is folks think it is immature BUT if they ever tried going with us they would be addicted just like we are) but chose not to do so based off of 1) weather concerns (I.e. Hurricane Season) 2) lack of day clubs 3) advice obtained from this site. I was a little nervous that we would be burned out on Vegas because we just went last summer but we chose to do it again anyway.
My wife set the following club gauntlet for us mainly due to DJ's in question:
Friday (9/18) Surrender (Lil Jon)
Saturday (9/19) EBC (Guetta)
Saturday (9/19) Marquee (Bennassi)
Sunday (9/20) EBC (Zedd) (we ate tickets for wet, EBC was too good to pass up)
Sunday (9/20) XS Nightswim (R L Greime)
Based on where we were planning on spending our time we decided to stay at the Wynn. We bought tickets to all of the Wynn Venues thru the concierge, which in some cases seemed only slightly marked up and in others they seemed incredibly marked up from the online price, all in all these tickets worked out very well, I will get into that more later but I think they were worth it.
We arrived in Vegas Friday around 6:00pm. We were both awake at 6:30am EST and could not sleep on the plane. This all made me worried because we had big plans and starting off far in sleep deficit land seemed like a disaster waiting to happen.
Because we were flying in on a Friday evening I was worried that the cab line would be out of control so I opted to have a Sedan from the concierge pick us up, cost was around 80 after tip so while more expensive than a cab a good way to start out.
Get to the Wynn, no wait for check in. The employee checking us in offered us a $30/night upgrade for a panoramic view room, I passed because we were basically using the room as a locker. Turns out we ended up with a great view anyway, one thing about this, our room was facing fashion show mall, this was key in the morning As no morning sun seemed to bother us.
I was not fond of the restaurant options in the Wynn/encore, nothing fast and the nice options were not really appealing for some reason. We end up eating at Wazuzu which was good, we should have probably went all out for a nicer dinner Friday because we ended up needing to cancel our Saturday and Sunday reservations because of our waking up late from the day clubs. Wazuzu did have a interesting mix of folk inside, which I guess the encore always did; a mix of people who just had spent the day at EBC and older couples. The drinks at Wazuzu were good/strong and about the same if not less than in the clubs.
We end up finishing dinner around 9:30 and head to one of the hotel bars to have a few drinks before heading into Surrender. This was a good move because it kept my wife's feet from being tired and we got to pregame.
There was a line but nothing tragic, nevertheless we are told because we have the concierge tickets that we should go directly to the side of the front door and they would let us in, worked well.
By this point it was around 11, we walk in and the club is empty. So we head to the pool bar portion to continue to drink, for the record they did let my wife sit on a couch without bottle service and they did give me free water with all drinks. Not much of a wait for the drinks at the bar, but not much love for my heavy tipping either. Pretty much immediately my wife wants to dance which is a bit of a problem because the place is still a little empty and (largely due to the fact that we were drinking already for 3 hours) I think we were being the most rowdy people there at that point. Things fill up pretty quickly around midnight, if I were trying to save money I could have easily pregamed until 12 and came down and got right in with the tickets.
So the decision on where to go Friday was a hard one. We really wanted to go to Drai's mainly because we love that venue but they had a concert which would not be our thing (we watched some YouTube stuff of the same artist there and we did not think that it would be our scene). We ruled out Hak because everything we read here said GA there was a disaster. We ruled out XS because Guetta was there and we did not want to go back to back. Marquee was on our agenda for Saturday. I have been to light and did not like it which left us with Omnia Or Surrender, I am sad to say that Wynncore's persistent lambasting of The GA experience at Omnia on seemingly every thread during the weeks leading up to this trip had worn me down (the picture of the big guy on the stretcher was the straw that broke the camels back, hits too close to home). So we checked out some you tube stuff of lil Jon and it looked like it would be fun.
Although Surrender is small we were able to access the dance floor anytime we wanted and the place was fairly full. I liked the place, fun vibe and nice outside feature allowing you to sit down if you wanted to. You could easily talk outside and then go back inside to get nuts.
One disadvantage of Surrender is the bathroom situation, why would they only have one opened up? There was a 30 person line for the men's room!! Makes no sense. My wife figured out early on that you could leave surrender, walk to the right out in the casino like 5 steps and access an empty casino bathroom and get immediate re-entry.
Lil Jon came on around 1-1:30. He put on a fun set, not just playing his music he played a good mix of stuff and while not more impressive than Guetta or Zedd he was better than anyone else we saw on this or any other trip.
My wife always seems to gravitate to the front at all of these places so we were right to the left of the stage when he played his shots song so of course he sends shots down for the girls in the first row, my wife gets given one by one of his guys; it was red and she said it tasted like cough syrup, she almost threw up and it was hilarious. I will never be able to attend a football game again and not think of that when his music comes on. Really great night.
Lil Jon went off stage around 3-3:30, we were up for 24 hours and drinking very hard for the last 6 at that point. I could feel myself blacking out (I had converted to shots at some point which was better logistically but in retrospect playing with fire), so other than the evidence of the time stamp on some random picture of my wife near those moraccas on the path to the Wynn taken at 3:45am I have no idea how or when we got home. My wife remembered little as well BUT she did remember forcing us to drink the coconut water I had stocked the room (I have never been so happy to see an empty bottle in the trash the next morning), such a good woman, for the first time of many this trip she saved the day.
Hope this is not too detailed or boring and I hope it gives some good info for folks. At some point I'll type out Saturday which was by far the funnest day ever (well Sunday was close)!
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