As more Vegas hotels implement a charge for parking, the discussion about why they would or if they should widens. A reviewjournal.com columnist named Wayne Allyn Root is suggesting that hotel and casino patrons share their opinion of paid parking on the strip by taking their business to the places that still offer it for free.
I think Las Vegas is a parking setting unlike any other. The regular rules don’t exactly apply because these are highly profitable businesses with heavy use and a unique product. For decades, visitors to Vegas enjoyed free parking, and casinos enjoyed giving it to them for free knowing they’d drop more than enough into the slot machines to cover costs. Asking people to pay now just seems greedy – a greedy casino, who knew? But the perks made gamblers feel like they were welcome, important, and not complete idiots. If you’re going to the strip to lose money for fun, it hurts less if you didn’t pay for parking.
Las Vegas residents have different reasons for resenting paid parking on the strip. They visit casinos like locals, regularly, casually, with guests and for special occasions. If you’ve been to Vegas, you know it’s a neon carnival in the middle of a thousand-mile desert. There’s not much else to do. Root writes:
Most of us visit the Strip every time a family member, friend or business associate visits. In my case that’s often 10 to 20 times per month. When you live in New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, different friends and relatives don’t visit 100 times per year. They do in Vegas.
Root writes further, that Vegas casino parking structures are massive and tough to navigate and these new policies are making harder for tourists, the disabled and the elderly to get around the strip. He offers a list of hotels and casinos where parking is still free and recommends locals and visitors alike take their extra cash to Venetian, Palazzo, Treasure Island, Trump Hotel, SLS Las Vegas, the Palms, the Stratosphere, Golden Nugget, Station Casinos (including Red Rock and Green Valley Ranch), Boyd properties (including the Orleans and Gold Coast), Arizona Charlie’s, the Cannery and the Rio.
Read the article here.
