Quote:
Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
A new Vegas hotel gets built in the 1990s. The rooms are large. It has a party "Mardi Gras" type atmosphere, with ongoing shows in the casino, and even an innovative floating "show in the sky" moving along the ceiling.
People like the concept. It's fun and interesting. They're willing to travel off-strip and over I-15 in order to visit or stay there.
Then the years pass by. It gets bought by Caesars, which neglects it, and lets the rooms get rundown and much of the facilities in disrepair.
I've stayed in both their largest suites in the newer (1997, Masquerade) 41 story tower, and in their "concierge butler" suites in the original 1990 tower.
My stays at the Rio were right around the turn of the New Millennium, and by then the older tower's suites had a musty sort of smell to them reminiscent of older ocean front California estates, which actually brought back Proustian memories that were nice for me, but might not be that endearing for most.
The newer suites I stayed in in the top floors of the new tower are large, but were similar to ones at the new Aladdin / Planet Hollywood with large carpeted vacant areas with no furniture which made them seem rather odd actually.
One thing I liked about the Rio was their high end high limit salon, which was both nice, and allowed anyone off the street to bet up to $100,000. at Baccarat - and this was at a time when the max on the Strip was $15,000. It wasn't right away after Harrah's (Harrah's bought the Rio, not Caesars - keep in mind that today's Caesars is not the original Caesars, but is merely Harrah's that bought out Caesars, and then changed ITS name from Harrah's Entertainment to Caesars' Entertainment) that posted limits were lowered, but sometime around 2000, the max bet was dropped to be in line with the rest of Vegas. No more $100K stated limits!
I haven't stayed at the Rio for well over two decades, although we would stop by occasionally for their Carnival World Buffet, which actually was quite good, at least up until the last time being at the very end of the 2000s - I don't know if the buffet remained solid after that, and of course it closed permanently during the Pandemic.