Planet Hollywood – Resort Vista Room (PH Redeemed from Wife’s Banning)

BigAzMarty reviews the Planet Hollywood’s Resort Vista Room.

BigAZMarty here writing up a room review on Planet Hollywood for those neat little round end rooms called the Resort Vista Room.

Now, if you know me, the wife and I had a horrendous visit in a, severely bad Resort Room on my birthday in 2012 and my wife refused to stay here ever again. But if you read my 4th of July room review for Bally’s Indigo Suite you would know I lost all room picks for a while. Sooooo….my wife wanted a quick getaway (although it would be a working mini-vacation for her) to Las Vegas. She decided finally after a visit to BURGR and some fun gambling at PH (with no stay of course) in the last year to “try it out again..of course with the itchy trigger finger if it ended up being still bad.” I looked online via her Total Rewards and spotted comp’d: the Hollywood Hip room (STD room), a PetStay non-smoking Resort King (bigger room and two sinks in the bathroom). But, the good choice was a nicely discounted Resort Vista room for about $500 total for four nights. Granted it wasn’t comp’d, but not bad compared to the $$$’s that MGM was extracting from everyone. Holy cow, even Excalibur had no comped rooms, and their rooms would have been over $1000 for the nights we had picked. So after pulling up a Map of the room and some photo’s from Oyster, she said why not and we booked it.

So in the middle of iHeart Radio Concerts and Life is Beautiful, we arrived on a Sat early evening, and she was already like “oh nooo.” Valet was full at the Lobby, but we noticed that Seven Stars and Diamond were funneling to a different lane…we get there, third car in line way far away from the lobby. The valet attendant comes over and looks at my wife’s Diamond Card and says you think you can fit in there? A spot in a barricaded area between two cars that are unloading baggage…I say sure, and they open the barricade and let us in. The Valet asks if we need a Bell Hop and we say “Sure” again (in case the first room is bad and we have to make some noise to get better accommodations before the bags are called for). The Bell Hop comes over, and my wife is already on her way to check in at the Diamond Check-In. I catch up as they are just starting to pull up the reservations (no waiting in Diamond Check-In). I quickly intercept her ID and CC and do the $20 trick. They say they do have some better options and offer this tip: if you want the view of the Bellagio Fountains, stay in North Tower and if in Resort Vista room stay in rooms ending in 80 and floors 14 or higher (lower and the Miracle Mile shops facade blocks the view). We get our two free bottles of water (a must in Las Vegas) and head up.

Gallery: Views from the room

The Resort Vista rooms are at the end of the short towers that come out from the main hotel building and part of the end of the building round area. On most North Tower floors there are two rooms at the end, the left room ending in 79 is the room that faces more towards the pool areas and Cosmo, the room on the right ends in 80 and faces all the stuff we want to see…Cosmopolitan, Bellagio and Bellagio Fountains, Paris including the Tower and Caesars Palace Augustus and Octavius towers…in the distance, we can see up the strip a bit but Bally’s blocks a lot with the Jubilee Tower. We step into the room, and it’s remarkably clean even though it’s an older design (from when Planet Hollywood took over the Aladdin), but it’s been maintained really well (a little overspray on the ceiling from re-staining the entertainment center was all that we really noticed). Everything expected was in the room from the photos except for one thing….the makeup mirror. So I note that and tell the wife (she’s actually in shock…and in a good way about how the room looks). I ask if I can call the Bell Hop and she’s actually excited about the stay, so she says sure. While I call down to the Bell Hop extension, they take our room number and ask if there is anything else, I say yes we are missing the Makeup Mirror in the room for my wife. They immediately take down all the info and say maintenance is on its way, a noticeable difference from the last time. The Bell Hop shows up first, and the wife and I unpack into the his-and-hers closets in the room (I, of course, take the closet with the safe and ironing board..so she has an unencumbered closet space)…there are plenty of hangers (6 in each closet). The room is a different layout from the standard square boxy shapes the Hip or Resort rooms have because of the space at the end of the building (see here and scroll down to the map of Resort Vista room…ours was a mirror of the map).

Room explanations as follows:

1. Main Entrance there is a His and Her’s closet with a small but serviceable desk between them and the room phone on the desk (yup not bedside nor in the water closet). There are three doors out of this area (room door to outside, the first section of bathroom and bedroom/living area).

2. Bedroom / Living area, first off the view you get three different angled floor to ceiling windows with a slightly different view. The bed has two night stands with lamps on each side of the bed. Nice headboard and really comfy mattress. No bad bed springs or too stiff of a mattress. Just right. About on par with the Mandalay Bay, Caesars Palace, and Cromwell pillow top beds. Suggestion if these are the Simmons pillow tops with the Everlast technology (i.e. removable and replaceable pillow top portion) over time the pillow tops should be replaced to make the middle ridge less noticeable. Didn’t affect sleeping so not a big deal and bed was the perfect height. On the other side is the built in entertainment center with two drawers and a nice Panasonic Plasma that is an excellent HDTV. Right in front of the TV is a lamp, a table with memorabilia and a nice upholstered chair to sit in and watch TV. To the side is a small french door that leads to the bathroom.

Gallery: Bedroom and Living Area

3. Bathroom, this is sorta hard to explain, but a lot of the bathroom is actually behind the Entertainment Center portion of the bedroom / living area. What would be a long hallway to the main area of the bathroom, PH decided to put to use, and ran a long counter down one side and put in another sink. It also houses the coffee maker. Now down past that long counter is the actual bathroom area. A deep soaking tub with a dedicated window as well as another Panasonic Plasma TV same size as in the bedroom / living area one. In there is also another sink and a fairly large shower stall (I mean this in the way that I don’t have to do any contortions to get in there and move about like most LV shower stalls). The shower stall has a fairly tall and long seating area as well. Outstanding water pressure in there and it took some experimenting to get it off the “1200 psi” settings on the shower-head, but boy were you clean when done…so much so that my wife never tried the soaking tub which she always does!!! The water closet contains both a toilet and a bidet, both at reasonable heights. There are hooks on the walls for hanging bathing suits/robes (not supplied) for drying.

Additional items are a fairly nice and a long room service book. It looks a lot like the Planet Dailies menu, but to our surprise, it doesn’t match exactly. We found out after visiting downstairs that the room service menu has some items we could not get at Planet Dailies in the same timeframe. It’s a good option at that late timeframe when not much is open, and the cafes are limited menu. We didn’t get a chance to order much as my wife was doing a working vacation and we kept fairly normal hours (in bed by 1:30 AM and up by 10 AM).

The one sticking point and how to get around it was interesting. For some reason the first day the room wasn’t made up with over 4 hours away from the room and leaving at 10:30 AM – 2:30 PM before we came back. We called down, and they said to make sure we didn’t have privacy on the door (of course we didn’t) so next day we nipped that excuse in the bud and never had any issues after that. We just called down every morning as we left the room to have the room made up and no further issues.

As for the resort, there are two pools (adults only pool has been switched to the left side pool, and the right side pool is now the everyone pool). We went to the everyone pool as it had less people and could find seating easily. The pool seemed to have been recently redone as the plaster felt new and smooth and water was very clean but on the cool side. Most people were hitting the jacuzzi which was not as hot as my wife likes it, but I preferred it. There were some foot jets in that that made my day after a lot of walking. The Flowrider is to the left near the adult pool and for I think $25 you get a 30-minute session on it. My wife wanted to try it, but after seeing several fall video’s and me reminding her she’s had back surgery, she decided wisely to avoid it. Fun to watch though and reminded me of my So Cal days when I grew up walking distance to the beach. Oh, and new to the property was an ID requirement to charge back to the room. We’d never heard that before but most of the places are now checking ID against the registered name in the Hotel DB now.

The casino has a lot of the new machines, but slot turnover seems to have removed a lot of our favorites. No Wiz Ruby Slippers machines, no Willy Wonka Machines…but newer ones like Walking Dead, new three-game Big Bang Theory, Gremlins and Dragon Spin have moved in, as well as a several large format Buffalo machines and some Wonder Woman machines. We had fun at the classic Batman machines, and my wife loves OMG Kittens and Puppies, so that floated her boat for a while. I played Bier Haus 200. VP was O.K. more 4OAK’s and we saw one $1 Royal hit…on a machine where I was doing .25 DDB just minutes earlier (yeah I heard about it for 2 days). The sports book was so packed on Sunday morning at 10:30AM (Ringers even wanted $100 for a table during Sunday games). We moved over to the PBR Bar in Miracle Mile shops where they accommodated us by putting on our game on the projection screen, and we ordered and ate through 3.5 quarters of our game before leaving disappointed in our team–but not the service, food, and drink. a great option there and I would suppose Blondies is as well.

The attached shopping mall (Miracle Mile Shops) is still great to walk through and here is a neat thing…back at the back of the mall near self-parking garage is a kiosk if you present your AAA card you can get a booklet of discount offers from the various shops, restaurant, and theaters. We used the 25% off the La Salsa Cantina for some yummy standard cheese enchilada’s (Enchilada Rojas) and chips and salsa. We also got BOGO for Zombie Burlesque at the VIP section at V Theater, a really good LV show. The M.C. makes the show and my wife enjoyed it and she doesn’t like “strip tease” shows. It’s a funny show with a 50’s Zombie movies theme and some pretty attractive zombies who are very flexible. The M.C. reminded me of the Diva’s show at The Linq, the one that was there when Frank Marino was out sick.

There were lots to do and see and we only left the property once to go over to Paris and do the Eiffel Tower during the day (made a slight mistake and went at 2 PM instead of 3 PM when the Bellagio Fountains start up during the week) but, hey, great views. And, that guy at the tower escalator blew me away with what he knew (tell him where you are staying at and he’ll recite the history of the property back to what it originally opened as and dates).

Back to PH and some restaurant observations. Yolo’s has expanded both dining and menu, they now have some fantastic items and we almost didn’t make it to our other favorite Mexican food place. The Yolo’s version of Cheese Enchilada’s is more true Mexican using the white Mexican cheeses and we opted for the two types of rice instead of rice and beans (cilantro rice and standard Mexican rice) as well as Chips and Salsa with Queso which was very nice. Ringers off the sports book is a great option for quick bites (not cheap) and you can get the PinUp Pizza slices there. For my wife and I, the sliders are a waaaaay better option with the waffle fries. Bacon Cheeseburger sliders…yummy…and after those, I had no reason to go to White Castles. Planet Dailies was a great option for late night dining for early breakfast options. The Diamond Lounge on the mezzanine section was good with snacks and drinks (hot food is 4PM to 6PM only for Diamond Level players and above), so far Paris, Planet Hollywood and Caesars Palace Diamond Lounges are top notch in LV (Flamingo’s needs serious work and Harrah’s is a cave–too dark and ceilings too low). Other casino restaurant options are Koi, Strip House, BURGR, and two Starbucks (one at casino level and one at Lobby Level). If you don’t like any of these, the Miracle Mile shops have a ton of others to choose from so basically a full selection of food types without needing to go outside. But, if you do, Pink’s Hot Dogs and PinUp Pizza have the strip side venue’s for you as well as Nacho Daddy’s on the Harmon street side. And I don’t count the Walgreen’s building as attached but Twin Peaks and McD’s is over there as well.

All in all a great stay! we may make PH our home base again it was that good.

[Photos: BigAzMarty]

BigAzMarty

A computer professional who has worked at several types of positions with several different businesses and still learning and changing.
Introduced properly to Las Vegas and Laughlin by the spouse and have been going ever since 1990.
A frequent visitor from not to far away where it’s almost always 10 degrees warmer than Vegas.