HotelChatter

The room: There's something to be said for Las Vegas rooms, and that's that they are typically ginormous. Our $22 jewel was at the very end of the hall and although we didn't open the door to see a corner window view or anything, we did enter plenty of space to stretch out. The kind bed was a true king and the floor was large enough to have a slumber party, if that's your thing. *wink*

The TV was ancient, as was the desk/drawers. Not to mention that the room, despite an unparalleled view towards the mountains and over the city, was very dark and musty with, what we believe VegasChatter.com calls a "baked-in smell of sick." To prevent suicides, littering and whatnot, the windows only open about 2 inches, so there's no hope of airing the room out in a single night. Oh, and the hotel has apparently never heard of fitted sheets, as everything on the bed was a topsheet folded around, which easily shifted to reveal the mattress underneath.

The bathroom: Meh. Nothing special here, unless you count the broken towel rod laying on the vanity, complete with sharp metal end. The toiletries consists of two generic green bars of soap and a small squeeze bottle of "Desert Breeze" gel shampoo. There was a hair of unidentifiable origin lurking underneath the suction mat for the bathtub, so yeah we didn't touch anything.

The internet: OMG this was the worst. Our wrangling with the WiFi at The Sahara is a long and painful story, but here's the short of it: there were about 7 signals coming in, but only two were strong enough to both with. One of them—Cox-Hospitality—had a difficult paywall full of Terms & Conditions, in which was buried the $12.99 connection fee. To use this, you would have had to accept the terms, then turn on your TV and accept internet and it would give you a password on the TV to enter into the paywall to finally get online. We said F*ck that. The other signal was "Guest_Internet_Access," with an easy-to-use credit card payment page, charging the cheaper rate of $9.99. We went with this.

About an hour after paying for it, the signal dropped out over and over again. It was nighttime, however, so we chalked it up to heavy internet porn usage and hoped for better in the morning. Come 5:30am in Vegas, we again tried to log back on, but it wasn't having it. We called the front desk, who said they didn't know anything about the paid signal we had connected to, couldn't refund us, couldn't compensate us in any way and just generally had no idea about the WiFi at the hotel at all. Then we called Boingo out of desperation, to see if any nearby spots had their service. There was a trailer park in the vicinity, Boingo said, but not The Sahara.

And then the internet began working just after we yelled at our laptop that it was getting high time to debate the charge to our credit card. It sputtered over the next few hours, but it worked until Starbucks opened and we nearly sprinted there. We never want to go through that again.

Bottom Line: Yeah, it was interesting. The Sahara may be a cheap room at the end of the Strip, within easy walking distance of The Stratosphere, the "World's Largest Souvenir Store" and that lifesaving Starbucks, but otherwise it's nothing more than a last resort. We can't even imagine how we would have felt about the room had it not had that awesome view.

The only good part? We actually enjoyed playing around in the casino, as they have $1 video blackjack games with virtual dealers in front of you. With no one to judge our meager attempts at gambling, we felt pretty good about winning the $4 we did.

[Photos: HotelChatter]