The Delano Las Vegas is a nice hotel

Justine and I stayed at the Delano Las Vegas last weekend, and it was one of the better hotel stays we’ve ever had. I booked the room through Fine Hotels and Resorts, and I specifically picked the Delano because they offer a $100 resort credit (which includes dining), whereas most FHR hotels in Vegas limit credits just to the spa. Rates were pretty low for a Sunday-Tuesday stay right before Christmas, and I managed to book a “scenic view suite” for around $145 per night before all the extra fees.

The Delano is an all-suite hotel, and all the rooms look pretty nice. However, the scenic view suite was only nominally more expensive than the base room, and I decided to gamble that we’d get upgraded to one of the super fancy suites upon arrival. In my past experiences in Vegas, I’ve never received meaningful upgrades, since most Vegas hotels have 157 different room categories, and an upgrade usually consists of a room on a higher floor or with a slightly better view. In contrast, the Delano has a pretty big gap between the view suite and the next category up, the penthouse suites.

I figured this was pretty low-probability given the number of penthouse suites in the hotel, but to our surprise, we were indeed upgraded to a penthouse suite at check-in, and it was hands down one of the most impressive hotel rooms I’ve ever seen. Maybe this would be old-hat if I were a top tier Hyatt or SPG elite and was used to presidential suites and stuff, but I’m not, so I’m not. And honestly, anyone who wouldn’t be impressed by this room is too jaded to enjoy premium travel anymore, so they should switch to camping.

The room opens onto a marble foyer with a half bathroom, which leads into the main room of the suite. “Room” is probably misleading, since it’s more like an expansive cavern. There’s a giant L-shaped couch, a second sitting area, a wet bar, and a huge conference/dining table with room for 15 people. There are giant mirrors on each end of the room, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that these mirrors were also TVs.

Of course, the entire length of the room features floor-to-ceiling windows, and the view is stunning with all the curtains opened. This room faced the very end of the strip as well as part of Las Vegas airport. While I didn’t see any normal air traffic, I was excited to get a good view of the private terminal that sends the government’s “Janet” planes to Area 51.

Just this part of the room is bigger than our entire apartment at home, and the cost to stay here every night for a month would actually be less than a two-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. I got pretty sick the last day of our trip, and it was pretty nice just bumming around our giant room in a bathrobe and binge-watching Catfish on multiple TVs.

Speaking of TVs, there are five in total – two mirror TVs in the main room, two normal TVs in the bedroom, and one mirror TV in the bathroom. Not bad, right? As for the bedroom, on its own, it was bigger than a lot of hotel rooms and consisted of a sitting area and a bed separated by a partition.

Of course, the bathroom was something to behold as well. In addition to the usual stuff (his and her sinks, marble shower, etc), there’s a jetted tub that’s open to the rest of the room, and in a first for me, a separate sitting area. The toilet is in a separate room that also includes a bidet (also a first), and the cherry on top is that the shower doubles as a steam room (complete with a bench seat). It’s nuts.

So yeah, this room was ridiculous and amazing, and while we didn’t need anywhere close to this amount of space, it was pretty damn fun to have it.

Other stuff: we used our free breakfast credit both days, and the room service food was pretty good. Justine had eggs benny and said they were okay (she’s an eggs benny connoisseur though), and I had the housemade granola (yum), the quinoa cereal (not yum), and the lemon custard cakes (which are really just pancakes with some candied lemon rind sprinkled on them, in case you, like me, didn’t know what custard cakes actually were). After fees and tips, our breakfast came to around $80 each morning, so we did end up exceeding the $60 per day FHR stipend, although not by much.

The Delano is a non-gaming hotel, which is nice if you want a break from the casino scene (or if you just don’t want to have to walk through a cloud of cigarette smoke, slot machine noise, and desperation on your way from your room to the street). It’s only a minute or two walk to the Mandalay Bay, though, so you don’t feel disconnected from Vegas’s signature “charms” either. We used our $100 credit at one of the Mandalay Bay restaurants – I know some hotels restrict which restaurants qualify for the credit, although we were told that any restaurant within the Mandalay complex would count.

Overall, we got a fantastic value out of the FHR benefits – $120 for breakfast, $100 on food, plus the upgrade to a room that was almost 3x the cost of the room I actually booked. Also, since the mandatory resort fee covers wifi, you get a $5 per day credit in lieu of FHR’s normal free premium wifi benefit. Since you don’t have a choice in any case, it’s basically $5/day of free money. Unfortunately, the wifi at this hotel sucks really bad, and it constantly goes in and out. It’s decently fast when it works, but you can’t stream anything without the signal cutting out every few minutes.

Bottom line, I’d stay here again in a second. Even without the upgrade, I liked the hotel a lot. Good breakfast, stylish lobby and common areas, friendly service, etc. For variety’s sake, I want to try some other hotels, but after having stayed at the Bellagio, Venetian, and MGM, I’d say this was easily my favorite. (I also stayed at the Imperial Palace around 15 years ago, and I wouldn’t recommend it. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it so hard that I would even avoid the Linq, which is what the Imperial Palace blossomed into. Also, there’s an urban legend that the owner of the Imperial Palace had a huge collection of Nazi memorabilia somewhere in the hotel, but I don’t know if it was actually true or not.)