HotelChatter

Check-In
It's a long story (cough, bachelorette party, cough) but we didn't actually check ourselves into the Red Rock Resort & Spa. Yet we will say that there is no massive check-in area with roped off winding lanes like the ones you would see at the behemoth casino hotels on the Strip. Instead there is just a long front desk with two or three clerks ready at your service. However, there were a few times we had to hit up the front desk for new room keys because they kept getting de-magnetized and the line was only three people deep but took forever.

Room Reaction
What we loved about Red Rock from top to bottom and inside out is that it looks like a normal  fricking hotel. There's no cheesy Roman gladiator or Egyptian themes here. The room we stayed in on the fourth floor had the decor and amenities you would find in an urban boutique hotel and in a bigger space too. Our room had two full beds loaded with pillows, a marble bath with the TV over the bathtub, a separate enclave for the toilet and a spacious closet with a full-length mirror that makes you look skinny. Perfect for when you are baring your pasty skin in a bathing suit. A giant flat-screen TV hung on the wall opposite above the beds and the mini-bar was full of tasty gourmet goodies, although with a strict "Remove anything and you will be charged" policy.  The only complaint that we would have is that the carpet was a tad rough and that the hallways were ginormous. Ask for a room that's closer to the elevator.

Pool Scene
The pool at Red Rock is an enormous circle with an elevated water fountain in the center that kids loved to run around. There are only wicker lounge chairs with full cushions at the pool which saves you from dealing with those pool chairs with the white plastic straps. Ringing the immediate perimeter of the pool are some lounge chairs that actually sit in about three inches of water.

This sounds cool but then you realize there are no tables in between the chairs. So you either have to put your sunblock and reading material on the space behind you which is typically at the foot of someone else's lounge chair. Naturally, people drop stuff in the water when these sit in one of these perilous chairs and either forget about it or are too lazy to pick it out of the water. While we were swimming we encountered a plastic cup and several straws. Yuck. And did we mention there were children there? Double yuck because you know they are peeing in there.

On the brightside, the Sandbar grille provides much needed shade and $5 and $10 blackjack tables.  Additionally, if you rent a souped-up cabana (refrigerators, TVs, A/C, etc) you get to swim in the pools reserved for cabanas. So those should be cleaner than the main pool.

Casino, Restaurants, Spa & Salon
We are grouping these altogether because if we wrote about them individually this would be a very long and possibly boring review.

Since we were with a bunch of girls there was not much gambling done. In fact, we didn't do any but the casino is pretty big and there is every game that you would ever want to play there.

The hotel has three restaurants---the casual Grand Cafe (good for breakfast), the Cabo (a casual Mexican joint) and the T-Bones Steakhouse (for a fancy night out.) We sampled all three and the food was good but the service was lacking. (More on that below.)

The spa was excellent. The locker rooms have everything you could want from a spa--showers, steam room, sauna, cold plunge, dressing area, big lockers and tons of travel-sized toiletries for you to take.   The hotel has a full-service salon and like the spa, the prices are a bit jacked up but well worth it. Even better, the fitness center does not charge an entrance fee like most Vegas casino hotels do.

Service
Now it's really hard to gage service when you are constantly in a big group of girls in a bachelorette party but we still thought the service was a tad off everywhere. The Mexican restaurant messed up our orders and the waitress liked to disappear a lot. The poolside waitress almost lost it when we asked for ice water. Luckily for her it only took us 15 minutes before we started ordering Bloody Marys left and right. The exception was T-Bones who did everything right after making us wait 30 minutes past our reservations.

Cherry
We heard that Cherry which Rande Gerber opened is no longer part of Gerber's portfolio but it's still pretty cool. The entrance is very phallic looking. We didn't snap any pictures but we should have. The door handles looked especially phallic. Weird. Anyways, the cool part about Cherry is you can escape the indoor section which is loud, clubby and full of seizure-inducing strobe lights. There is an outside area which during the day is one of the swankier cabana sections by the pool. But at night you can kick back and relax here. Also cool is the bathrooms. The stalls have mirrors on the outside but once you lock yourself in the stall you can see out to the bathroom. It's a little unnerving because you can see some woman who looks like she is peering into your stall when really she is just adjusting her fake eyelashes in the mirror.

Cost
Since we split the room with three girls we paid $230 a night. So we're guessing the room was about $345 a night including taxes and all. Not cheap.

Bottom Line
We would totally come back here again. It was nice to be a clean, less smokey casino resort in the desert without dealing with the gross drunken tourists wandering up and down the strip. And we especially loved the spa. But by the second night, we were missing the strip.

Related Stories:
· Snapshot:  Red Rock's Bathtub TV [HotelChatter]

Tags: Las Vegas Hotel Reviews / Summerlin Hotel Reviews / Hotel Video Tours

by juliana