VEGAS MYTHS RE-BUSTED: You Know Which Floor Your Hotel Room is Really On

Posted on: January 5, 2024, 08:13h. 

Last updated on: January 4, 2024, 10:13h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Vegas Myths Busted” publishes new entries every Monday, with a bonus Flashback Friday edition. Today’s entry in our ongoing series originally ran on Sept. 11, 2023

If your room at The Wynn is on the 60th floor, you don’t have a 60th-floor view. You have a 48th-floor one. That’s because there are no 40-49th floors at that casino resort or its twin, Encore. Also missing are their 4th and 13th floors.

Bellagio
The main tower of the Bellagio has 36 floors. Try counting them using only this photograph. (Image: Wikipedia)

Most Americans understand skipping the 13th floor. Why would you want to rent a room there when you probably came to Las Vegas to chase good luck in a casino?

Rio elevator panel, Las Vegas
The floors at the Rio skip from 39 to 50. (Image: Scott Roeben/Vital Vegas)

But the 4th and the 40s are banished because, to many Asian visitors, the number 4 is just as unlucky as 13 is to Westerners. And that’s because it sounds similar to the word for “death.” Both are transliterated as “si” in Mandarin, and as “shi” in Japanese.

Also following this hotel-heightening design are Planet Hollywood, Aria, Delano, Resorts World, the Rio, and the Palms, which are all at least 10 stories shorter than they claim to be on their driver’s licenses.

The Window Trick

Strangely enough, counting Las Vegas Strip resort floors from the outside reveals the opposite deception. Most of the towers pretend to be much shorter than they actually are.

The Bellagio, for example, appears to have 14 stories above its lobby floor, but really has 36. That’s because each window on its first two “floors” is a grouping of six room windows spanning three floors. You can’t really tell unless you look from close up at night, with enough interior lights turned on since the heavily tinted windows obstruct daytime viewing.

For the rest of its 12 “floors,” each Bellagio window serves four rooms spanning two floors.

Bellagio, Las Vegas, window trick
From a distance, especially by day, these look like individual room windows on the Bellagio. But the lower ones are really three-story groupings of six windows each. The upper ones are two-story groupings of four windows each. (Image: Wikipedia)

Treasure Island and Caesars Palace also employ what’s known in the hospitality industry as “the window trick.” And the Wynn and Encore’s spin on it is to place one dividing stripe every two stories.

This architectural optical illusion produces a cleaner look and functions to fool you into regarding a tower as smaller than it really is, and therefore, a shorter walk from your current location on the Strip.

Look for “Vegas Myths Busted” every Monday on Casino.org. To read previously busted Vegas myths, visit VegasMythsBusted.com. Got a suggestion for a Vegas myth that needs busting? Email corey@casino.org.