Cell Phones Costing Las Vegas Casinos Big Bucks

from the can't-handle-the-pressure dept

Tue, May 6th 2003 8:03pm — Mike Masnick

Apparently, hotels in Las Vegas are worried that they're losing money since guests are (gasp!) using mobile phones to make calls, rather than using the in-room hotel phones and paying their extortionary rates. Of course, this is just a changing business condition that the hotels need to deal with - and one major way would be to offer high speed wireless internet access. At the same time, the article points out that Las Vegas hotels have less to complain about, since they make plenty of money from people gambling.

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Anonymous Coward, 7 May 2003 @ 9:03am

No Subject Given
Duh...
Bottomline is: even undiscount daytime rate on a cell phone are cheaper than what many hotels charge.

And if you're a frequent business traveler it doesn't take much smarts to realize that a few long distance evening calls home/wk to the spouse and kids at hotel rates is more than the monthly cost for a cell phone. (And if you're not smart enough, you'll probably get a little note from accounting explaining it the next time you hand in your expense report...)
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Brad Waddell, 27 Dec 2006 @ 3:24pm

this article is incorrect - no hotel has ever made money from gambling - CASINOS make money from gambling, hotels make money from room rentals. in todays world, unlike the old days, every department in a modern company must make a profit as a seperate entity, one department no longer carries another in the resort business. So if the Hotel department needs to make more money, they cannot depend on casino revenues, they need to make more money in the hotel - which is why they came up with the resort fee and the energy fee - so they can publish lower room rates but add these required charges when you arrive and they cannot be removed...
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