Gotta love those pink rooms! (Las Vegas Flamingo Hilton)

Member Name: k4ssie

Product:	Las Vegas Flamingo Hilton
Date:	11/06/09 (30 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: First class rooms; great central location

Disadvantages: Checkin queues can be huge

Even those not familiar with Vegas will probably have seen a shot of this iconic building at some point - it's one of the relatively few remaining "old Vegas" hotels, and the retro-style neon flamingo motif over the entrance immediately signal that you're in classic Vegas territory here.

We stayed for a few nights in May 07, and found that whilst the exterior might hark back to earlier glory days, the interior has very much kept up with ultra-modern style - or at least, the superior rooms (known as "Go" rooms, i have no idea why!) on the upper floors certainly have.

Like almost all of the big Vegas strip hotels, this place is a mini-resort in its own right, with the usual facilities - large, tropical style free form pool, numerous restaurants, large casino, and so on.

We chose the Flamingo on the basis of position - it's quite central on the Strip, which unless you're super fit should be a consideration as the walk from one end to the other is a serious hike - price, and good room reviews on the web. As ever with hotels, what you end up paying can vary wildly, we paid just under £100 per night for a Go room on the top floor with Strip views.

~ Our experience ~
As we had a hire car, first challenge was negotiating the parking situation. All hotels offer valet parking, and as we had cases etc to deal with we thought we'd use that because the parking lots are huge and we didn't fancy dragging the luggage a long way. Unfortunately, very shortly after we pulled up, so did a couple of guys in ludicrous Vegas Blingmobiles, whose "arrogant whistling at parking valet" skills far exceeded ours. Despite being first in the queue, we waited about 15 minutes before the valet got around to us, so first impressions of the Flamingo were not great!

....and about to get worse. Checkin, oh dear. Walking into the (massive and extremely grand) reception area, we were greeted by a huge post office style queue. Apparently this is quite normal for Vegas, as large business conventions come and go and huge numbers of people need checking in and out, and nobody else seemed very bothered. I couldn't believe we ended up queuing for the best part of 40 minutes....during the rest of our 3 weeks tour, the hotel service we experienced was almost uniformly brilliant, except for here. And i don't think they were having an off day, as when we walked through the lobby there was more often a reasonably sizeable queue than not.

~ The room ~
So, eventually we got to our room. By this stage i'm not in the best of moods, but i have to say the room made it seem at least slightly worthwhile. We'd upgraded to a Strip view room for about £20 more, so were on the top floor. Walking into the room and seeing the stunning view from the floor to ceiling windows was truly impressive - we overlooked the fountains at the Bellagio on one side, too, so could watch the fountain display from our bed!
The room was flawless in my opinion. The decor was perhaps best described as "groovy" but in a classy way - decorated in white and black with bright pink highlights and lots of chrome, obviously brand new and very nicely done. The room featured the obligatory king size plus bed with all-white linen, big fluffy pillows and duvet. We also got a very spacious bathroom with a few space age touches like an LCD tv which was part of the mirror, looked like a normal mirror until you turned it on. Best of all, the curtain open / close switch was next to the bed, so at the press of a button we could reveal that amazing view, which always felt very James Bond.
The corridors and rooms were reasonably soundproofed so we got very good nights' sleep, although it would've been nice if they could have asked the maids not to shriek and giggle quite so much in the corridors in the early morning.

We didn't make too much use of the other hotel facilities - the pool area was very lovely but tended to have loudish music playing, and anyway we only had a few days in Vegas to see everything so left pool snoozing for another time. I'm not a gambler so couldn't really comment on the Casino, they all look basically the same to me!

I did feel that the breakfast options were all on the expensive side, in a town where you could get a great steak supper for £10, a waffle and some fruit in a kind of food court area at the Flamingo (as against a sit down service restaurant), plus a drink, was coming in at almost the same. Still, you're a few minutes walk from an endless array of other options on the Strip, so no big deal really.

Overall, I would go here again just for the rooms and location, if i could get a good price, but in a competitive market i think they could pay a bit more attention to the rest of the customer experience - two stars deducted for the bits where we actually had to interact with the hotel, ie parking and checkin.

Summary: A Vegas icon.