UNLUCKY 7: The Worst Ideas Las Vegas Ever Had

The Las Vegas Strip is a monument to risk, reinvention, and the belief that any idea — no matter how strange, expensive, or impractical — might become the next big attraction. Sometimes that gamble pays off. Other times, it spectacularly misfires.

Here are our Top 7 picks for the worst ideas Las Vegas ever had. These aren’t minor missteps, they’re full‑scale blunders that burned millions and repelled visitors. Even in a town built on ridiculousness, some ideas should never make it past the drawing board.                                                                  

7. Lucky Dragon Casino (2016-18)

This small, Asian-themed casino north of and off the main Strip struggled from its 2016 opening day. It was an overly niche concept that suffered from its isolated location, marketing issues, and competition.

6. Tropicana’s Nikki Beach Dayclub/Club Nikki Nightclub (2011)

In 2011, a Miami-based hospitality company opened a sexy, high‑end, Miami‑style dayclub … in a casino whose core audience was coupon‑clipping retirees! It lasted one season, losing millions before being removed.

5. The Harmon Hotel at CityCenter (2008-2015)

MGM Resorts intended the Harmon Hotel to be a 49-story hotel/condo tower. But midway through its construction in 2008, the structure’s rebar reinforcement was discovered to have been improperly installed, or entirely missing, in critical shear walls.

The half-built embarrassment, fully visible to Las Vegas Strip traffic, had to be dismantled floor by floor. The demolition was completed in 2015, after MGM and its partners had sunk hundreds of millions into the project.

4. The Palms’ Playboy Club & Hugh Hefner Sky Villa (2006-12)

In 2006, the Palms introduced a Playboy Club, bunny dealers, and a $40,000-per-night Hugh Hefner Sky Villa. Partnering with Playboy Enterprises would have been a spectacular idea in 1974. But by the mid-aughts, the brand felt dated.

Hef was in his 80s, and his silk-robed, sexist fantasy from another era felt artificial to a younger generation that valued authenticity, autonomy, and egalitarian relationships. More importantly, there was now free internet porn.

3. MGM Grand Adventures Theme Park (1993-2000)

MGM Grand spent $120 million building a theme park onto the back of its relocated resort with roller coasters, shows, and movie-themed rides. The idea was to compete with Disney and lure families to Vegas.

The problem wasn’t the concept of an amusement park on the Strip. The lasting success of Circus Circus’ Adventuredome, which debuted the very same year, proves that.

The bad idea was not enclosing it inside a climate-controlled dome. Families take vacations when school’s out for the summer. But MGM Grand Adventures forced them to stand in long lines in 110-degree heat.

2. Sirens of TI (2003-2013)

Treasure Island’s Battle of Buccaneer Bay pirate show was a fun, family-friendly, free spectacle. Replacing it with a half‑baked, hyper‑sexualized MTV video featuring bad music and worse dialog was, pun intended, the worst entertainment misfire in Las Vegas history.

Sirens of TI became a punchline, alienating families and failing to attract young gamblers into the casino. Crowds began watching it ironically, to see if it really lived up to the hype of how bad they heard it was. (It did.)

TI eventually made the show walk the plank.

1. A Monorail That Skips the Airport (2004-present)

In 1995, MGM Grand and Bally’s introduced a simple shuttle connecting them using two used Disney Mark IV trains. That was a perfectly good idea — unlike the idea to expand the system into a four-mile white elephant that travels only behind seven east‑side resorts without an airport connection.

Las Vegas Monorail cars lack luggage space, which was the primary reason aviation officials gave for repeatedly rejecting airport monorail station proposals. After opening in 2004, the monorail underperformed, went bankrupt twice, and was bought for $24 million (1/27th of its $650 million construction price) in 2020 by the LVCVA, which plans to retire the aging system between 2033-35, repurposing its elevated track for the Vegas Loop.