I ate at several dining spots during my stay and had an especially memorable meal at Olives by Todd English, a Mediterranean restaurant. Virgin Hotel Las Vegas Restaurants and Bars The restaurant selection is excellent, with a few quick and casual options too, plus there’s a convenience store and an ice cream shop. You could easily stay put at this hotel for days though and have everything you need at your fingertips.

The monorail is a few blocks away, as is the Vegas Strip. I even walked a block and hopped a local bus to downtown and when it was time to fly out, caught a Lyft ride a few steps from the entrance in a designated pick-up zone. The location here has some clear advantages: it’s near the university and normally priced restaurant options, plus it’s one of the closest major hotels to the international airport.

The Virgin Hotel Las Vegas location may put off some, but I found it to be more convenient than some of the strip hotels that are still a mile away from anything you can walk to. (The lobby and bar soundtrack got a less radical update: from ’70s classic rock to rock from the ’80s and ’90s.) After a half-million-dollar purchase price and then a year of work while it was closed, everything now looks sparkling new. This used to be the location of the Hard Rock Hotel for 15 years, off the strip on Paradise Road, but it got a revamp from top to bottom for the rebranding. While this is a new resort property, the Virgin Las Vegas is not the first hotel on this site. The hotel is managed by Hilton as a Curio Collection property, so you can also earn or cash in points. You can even park your car for free if you drive here, another Vegas rarity. The price you see on booking sites is the actual nightly rate before taxes that includes everything a hotel includes in normal cities, with no surprises. For now anyway, the marketing people have won out over the accountants. I’m hoping I don’t have to come back and edit this later like we had to do for other hotels that opened with a “no resort fee” promise and then caught the bait-and-switch virus later and reneged. Plus Virgin has a big, huge, massive competitive advantage in this city: No resort fees! The intimate spaces scattered throughout have thoughtful design touches to make you smile.

One of the newest hotels to open as of late 2021, it manages to pack a lot into the buildings holding its 1,500+ rooms, but it does that without feeling overwhelming. In a city that’s all about being bigger and more extreme, Virgin Hotel Las Vegas feels like a cool breath of fresh air.

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