Destinations

Over Thanksgiving, I spent the weekend in Las Vegas and stayed at Thehotel.  It is part of the Mandalay Bay complex which also includes the Four Seasons.  Thehotel is totally different from Mandalay Bay - no casino (you can easily reach Mandalay Bay’s casino through a passage), very elegant, modern decor with muted greys, creams, blacks (no raging Cirque de Soleil meets bardello colors), only two restaurants - one casual, the other fine dining.  All the rooms are suites consisting of separate living room and bedroom with huge bathrooms.  Also, it is very secure.  The main entrance in in Mandalay Bay’s parking garage, which seems really strange at first, but if I was trying to avoid crowds, this is perfect.  Apparently, lots of celebrities stay at Thehotel because of this.

If you have to be in Las Vegas, and don’t want to gamble or be in huge casino hotels, this is the place.  The price was really reasonable also.

I attended a large conference in Las Vegas in August and as this was my first time, I was impressed by the seamless way that Bellagio dealt with 3300 attendees, feeding them breakfast, tea, lunch and dinner, changing meeting venues from huge appointment rooms to reception rooms, to elegant dining rooms hosting 1500 plus people.  Normally, in this type of situation, I would expect the food to be pretty bad – not so with Bellagio.  With 9000 employees, 900 of whom are chefs and 3 master wine sommeliers, the buffets were excellent with lots of choices – no rubber chicken here!  Dinners were all sit down affairs with full service. The staff was great – very happy to accommodate requests, very organized, very efficient.  I found this throughout the hotel.  There are close to 4000 rooms with 9 possibilities of restaurant/cafes and enough shopping to allow one to never leave Bellagio.  In fact most of us never did leave Bellagio, what with the 800am to 430pm vendor appointments and then dinners every evening.

Whoever is in charge of making the Bellagio machine work should probably be voted in as President of the United States.  I have never experienced organization of this magnitude.  One can understand why large corporations keep returning to Bellagio.