I know more people who hate Las Vegas than love it, and I’ve never been able to construct a convincing argument for why they’re wrong. We are granted only so many vacations in this life, and it might seem ill-considered to spend one of them watching the Blue Man Group in an Egyptian-themed hotel in the Nevadan desert. But here I was, at the Luxor, on a quest to renew my love affair with this city.
In September, the Luxor participated in the “Fabulous Five-Day Sale,” a massive weeklong initiative launched by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, offering cut-rate deals on restaurants, resorts, and shows across the city. The goal was to coax lapsed vacationers back to America’s sanctum of indulgence, greasing the wheels of a hospitality sector that’s struggled all year long. More to the point, it was a tacit admission that something in Las Vegas had gone awry. Significantly fewer visitors have come to the city in 2025 than they did in 2024, when Vegas hosted more than 41 million travelers, and it’s now facing the worst dip in traffic since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Agitators in the city have attempted to document the deterioration by posting ominous images of barren casinos, conjuring the perception of a place hollowed out by economic armageddon. The reality is more nuanced, but it is true that practically every conceivable indicator tracking tourism to Las Vegas is flashing warning signs. Hotel occupancy has cratered. Rooms were only 66.7 percent full in July, down by 16.8 percent from the previous year. The number of travelers passing through Harry Reid International Airport also declined by 4.5 percent in 2025 during an ongoing ebb of foreign tourists, for familiar reasons. Canadians, historically one of the city’s most reliable sources of degenerates, have effectively vanished. Ticket sales for Air Canada jets flying to Las Vegas have slipped by 33 percent, while the Edmonton-based low-cost carrier Flair has reported a 62 percent drop-off. Those last data points have provoked the city’s mayor, Shelley Berkley, to engage in some emergency diplomacy. In September, she implored our neighbors from the north to make their prodigal return to the Strip.
“I’m telling everyone in Canada, please come,” she said. “We love you, we miss you, we need you.”
Where did everyone go? Nobody seems to know for sure. It’s clear that the city is in the midst of a rough season. What is more vexing is diagnosing what the issue actually is. Are there some obvious, observable problems to explain the swoon? To a certain extent, yes. Vegas has grown more expensive in recent years—hotels and restaurants have gotten pricier, gambling more extractive. But complaints about the cost of leisure have also hampered every other city in America. Tourism is down nationwide, even if destinations like New York City and Los Angeles haven’t suffered as much as Vegas. The terminal plunge of Canadian visitation, meanwhile, is almost certainly related to Donald Trump’s goading the nation at every opportunity. This trend is set to continue into 2026, with experts forecasting as much as a 6 percent drop in foreign visitation to the United States, curtailing tourism sectors all across the country.
But what’s ailing Vegas might be harder to quantify than any material factor—closer to spiritual rot than pure economic tumult. Multiple generations of Americans have been socialized to believe that a mecca of cheap, dirty pleasures awaits in the wastelands of southern Nevada. And for a long time, that was basically true. The mythology of Las Vegas is all-day buffet counters as big as football fields, of David Copperfield tickets that cost the same as a cup of coffee, of indoor cigarettes and comped drinks and the irresponsible ideas those forces can summon in tandem. Las Vegas took your money with gracious respect for your degeneracy, gouging you sweetly and slowly. The magnitude of excess saturated time itself. Somehow, no matter how much you lost at the casino—and you will lose at the casino—it always felt as if you got your money’s worth.
These days, though, that dream is in tatters. Millions of people seem to have determined that Las Vegas has become corroded—its joys less accessible, its humiliations too dire. And that is precisely why I, a longtime devotee of the city, found myself at the Luxor for a three-day stint in October. If Las Vegas was truly in decline, I wanted to see for myself what had gone so wrong. And boy did I.
John and Kristina Mehaffey, the husband-and-wife duo who run the gambling news website Vegas Advantage, asked to meet me at Harrah’s, one of the chintzier casinos on the Strip, located just up the road from Madame Tussauds. Vegas Advantage is famous for its obsessively updated database, which tracks the city’s gambling landscape. If a game room has just installed a fresh band of blackjack felt, the Mehaffeys are the first to know. I reached out to them because I wanted a tour of the infamous triple-zero roulette wheels, which have become a symbol for latter-day Las Vegas hubris. These tables were unheard of in the city until 2016, when two of them made landfall in the bowels of the luxe Venetian. The game has since proliferated across the Strip, for one reason: Every time a player sits down for a few spins of triple zero, they’re getting ripped off.
The Mehaffeys escorted me past the blinking slot machines and into the pit, where we sidled up alongside a gaggle of players peering over the wheel—watching the silver ball zip along the rim. John explained the math: A standard roulette table has 36 numbers—half red, half black. Hit your number, and you’re paid 35 to 1; bet on a color, and you double your money. Quantitatively speaking, a roulette wheel fashioned this way would be totally fair. “Theoretically, over a million spins, you’d get 100 percent of your money back,” said John.
A green felt table with numbers and alternating orange and black squares. There are three zeros at the beginning, making the odds worse for the player.A green felt table with numbers and alternating orange and black squares. There are three zeros at the beginning, making the odds worse for the player.
A triple-zero roulette table. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images Plus.
Where the house maintains its edge is in the two additional numbers foisted upon the roulette wheel, a single zero and a double zero, both painted green. With those digits in place, betting on red or black is no longer a 50/50 proposition, and if a player is lucky enough to score a win on a 7, or a 12, or a 28, they’re still making what they bet back by a multiplication of just 35—despite the fact that those green spaces allow for 38 potential outcomes. All this is to say that each zero added to a roulette table increases the revenue it scrapes from players by 2.7 percentage points. So, in a moment of incredible audacity, the power brokers of Las Vegas decided to sharpen their advantage, festooning a gauche and unsightly triple zero to their wheels, plundering our wallets more efficiently than ever before.
Why would anyone put up with those bad odds? That’s not quite the right question to ask. Later on in the day, I watched a bachelor party descend upon a triple-zero wheel, despite that, right next to them, bathed in fluorescent light, a double-zero table—encircled by empty seats—waited for customers. The serene, vodka-buzzed tourists either didn’t know or didn’t care that they were inches away from a much better deal. Vegas happily feasted upon that ambivalence all night long.
Vegas seems to have exported its triple-zero philosophy across the Strip. Another casualty is blackjack, which remains the most popular casino attraction in the city. Historically, the game has followed a golden rule. If you are dealt 21—an ace and a 10—you’ve hit blackjack, and your wager is paid out on a 3-to-2 ratio. (A $100 bet nets $150, and so on.) But Vegas has since altered the rules. Now, on most tables, blackjack is rewarded with a 6-to-5 equation; that same $100 kicks back only $120, significantly curtailing just how lucky someone is allowed to get. Again, it’s not hard to see why Vegas casinos made the change. “They’re tripling the house edge,” John told me. “It went up from about 0.66 percent to 2 percent.”
Even if a gambler is willing to tolerate these perversions of tradition, the price of admission in Vegas has skyrocketed. According to John’s research, in 2020, 38 casinos in the greater Las Vegas gambling market featured tables dealing 3-to-2 blackjack capped at a $5 minimum bet. (As in, to play, you need to risk at least $5 per hand.) These days, that group has dropped to six casinos. Prowl through the Strip after dark, sift through the pits, and you’ll feel the difference. Most table games in 2025 force patrons to sacrifice painful amounts of cash to its maw—$25 minimums are basically standard. Fifty-dollar minimums aren’t uncommon either. Even more deviously, some Vegas properties force customers to pay a premium to access friendlier rules. I came across exactly one ultra-rare single-zero roulette wheel on the Strip, which felt a little bit like uncovering the hutch of the last surviving dodo. Naturally, it was stowed away in a high-limit room. (...)
It might seem wise to make room for smaller bankrolls in the city—the soul of Las Vegas is contingent on budget travelers—but those appeals are invariably ignored. Like so many other pleasures of modern life, Las Vegas is increasingly becoming a city financed by private equity. Harrah’s Entertainment, the gambling company that owned the casino where I met the Mehaffeys, was sold to a pair of equity sponsors in 2008 for $27.8 billion. One of those firms was Apollo Global Management, a New York–based real-estate holdings group that in 2022 made a play for the iconic Venetian hotel. That pattern has continued across the Strip. Blackstone, the commercial real-estate giant, entered sale-leaseback agreements for the Bellagio in 2019 and picked up the MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay in the years afterward. Blackstone would later sell some of those investments to Vici Properties, a real-estate investment fund founded in 2017, which owns a total of 54 casinos. The mom-and-pops have been bought off, the copper wiring is stripped, and as so often is the case with Wall Street, that tends to be the plan all along.
“The casinos on the Strip are no longer being driven by personalities at leadership. They’re being driven by corporate politics. So they have a different attitude about how you treat your consumers,” said Andrew Woods, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “Why wouldn’t the resort industry find a way to maximize shareholder value by nickel-and-diming their consumers? Especially when, until very recently, those consumers haven’t pushed back.”
His point recalled a conversation I had with Jacob Orth, better known by his online moniker JacobslifeinVegas, who has been publishing YouTube videos about Las Vegas for the past 11 years. In earlier eras of his channel, Orth’s videos had a frothy self-help flair; he doled out advice on how to best enjoy some of the more revelrous temptations the city has to offer. (His best-performing upload is titled “5 Ways Las Vegas Prostitutes Scam You.”) Lately, though, Orth’s repertoire has grown increasingly despondent as he chronicles the sense of precipitous decline pervading the Strip. His second-most-popular video was published three months ago. The title: “Why Nobody Wants to Visit Las Vegas Right Now.”
Orth told me a story that he thinks illustrates what has changed. Two years ago, he dumped a couple thousand dollars into a slot machine with the intention of losing his way into a free room. This is a classic Vegas ritual; there is a long history of casino managers giving away free meals, drinks, and lodging to whales willing to risk a tremendous amount of money on their property. The plan worked, and a few weeks later, Orth received a letter in the mail inviting him back to the casino with a complimentary suite. However, rather than the red-carpet treatment he expected—the licentious glamour of earlier epochs in the desert—Orth found the whole process oddly onerous. He ate a conspicuous “resort fee” on his room to the tune of $90. He was told if he made the booking over the phone, he would be charged $15 more. Early check-in, meanwhile, would cost another $60. When Orth finally got into the suite, he found the bathroom covered with questionable splotches. When he asked the front desk for a different room, the attendant inquired about his membership tier.
All told, the experience left Orth with a feeling shared by a lot of people who’ve traveled to Vegas lately. “Can I just get a clean room without having another fee thrown at me?” he said. “It’s like, ‘Do you guys even want me here?’ ”
by Luke Winkie, Slate | Read more:
Image: illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus[ed. Way too expensive. Normally you'd accept the possibility inevitability of losing money as part of the experience. But now it's mostly trying to avoid being ripped off. My friends used to opt for downtown and outlying casinos, but even those are getting more expensive now.]
