Posters on the Las Vegas boards fault price most at Aria and Bellagio and rooms most at Luxor and Excalibur

Counted once per thread from May 13 to October 15, 2026, 17 of 25 Aria threads and 16 of 27 Bellagio threads on price lean negative. Luxor and Excalibur draw the largest negative shares on rooms, and Fontainebleau the smallest.

The desk · Oct 16, 2026

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Price talk on the boards leans most negative at Aria and Bellagio, and room talk at Luxor and Excalibur

The desk read 5,569 opinions of named Las Vegas resorts in 1,559 message-board and social threads posted from May 13 to October 15, 2026, and counted each thread once for each resort and topic. On price and fees, 17 of 25 threads (68%) at Aria lean negative, and 16 of 27 threads (59%) at Bellagio. Those are the two highest shares among the 14 resorts with at least 15 threads on price.

On rooms, 12 of 27 threads (44%) at Excalibur and 19 of 44 threads (43%) at Luxor lean negative, the highest among the 15 resorts with at least 15 room threads. Their price talk is milder than at Aria and Bellagio: 19% of Luxor's 31 price threads and 30% of Excalibur's 33 lean negative. The lowest negative shares on price are at Park MGM (5% of 20), Mandalay Bay (6% of 16) and Planet Hollywood (11% of 19). On rooms they are at Fontainebleau (3% of 38), Vdara (8% of 39), Planet Hollywood (9% of 23) and MGM Grand (9% of 34).

With 25 threads, Aria's price share has a 95% interval of 48% to 83%, and Luxor's room share one of 30% to 58%. The intervals for Aria and Bellagio sit wholly above those for Luxor, New York-New York, The LINQ, Planet Hollywood, Mandalay Bay and Park MGM on price, and the intervals for Luxor and Excalibur wholly above those for the Cosmopolitan, Bellagio, the Venetian, MGM Grand, Planet Hollywood, Vdara and Fontainebleau on rooms. Every other resort's interval overlaps at least one of the two leaders' intervals.

Aria and Bellagio draw praise for rooms and complaints on price, while Luxor and Excalibur draw praise on price and split on rooms

For the 12 resorts with at least 15 threads on both rooms and price, the chart plots net room sentiment against net price sentiment: positive threads minus negative threads, as a share of all threads on the topic. Aria (rooms +30, price −52) and Bellagio (+56, −33) sit where rooms are praised and price is faulted, with the Cosmopolitan and Flamingo. Luxor (−5, +48) and Excalibur (−7, +27) sit where price is praised and rooms are close to even.

The Venetian (+70, +3), Park MGM (+41, +75), Mandalay Bay (+48, +38), New York-New York (+27, +57) and Planet Hollywood (+74, +58) are positive on both. Fontainebleau is positive on rooms (+79) and even on price, 8 positive and 8 negative of 20 threads. No resort on the chart is negative on both. Circus Circus has 12 room threads, under the floor of 15, and 8 of them lean negative.

MGM Resorts operates Aria, Bellagio, Luxor and Excalibur. Travelers Today reported that MGM launched an all-inclusive package at Luxor and Excalibur on March 25, 2026, and listed room remodels at Aria and the Cosmopolitan among the projects MGM has announced.

Price complaints at Aria and Bellagio span rates, food and fees, and room complaints at Luxor and Excalibur include dated rooms

The negative price threads at Aria and Bellagio range across room and suite rates, food and drink prices, table minimums, resort credit at checkout, and the resort fee charged while Aria's pools were closed in late September. ResortFeeChecker's Las Vegas list, last updated in October 2026, shows resort fees of $62.36 a night at Aria and Bellagio and $51.02 at Luxor and Excalibur. Those equal $55 and $45 plus the 13.38 percent room tax, the same pre-tax fees the Review-Journal listed in January 2025.

The negative room threads at Luxor and Excalibur include complaints about dated rooms and upkeep, and also about staff, upgrade requests and each resort as a whole; several writers separate Luxor's pyramid rooms from its tower rooms. Counting only opinions from writers reporting their own stay, 11 of 34 Luxor room threads (32%) lean negative and 16 lean positive, and at Excalibur 6 of 20 (30%) lean negative and 7 positive, so among guests who stayed both come out positive on rooms, Luxor at +15 and Excalibur at +5. Those are still the two highest negative shares among the 14 resorts with at least 15 own-stay room threads; Fontainebleau's is 1 of 35.

Service reaches 15 threads at 5 resorts. Aria (12 of 30 threads, 40%) and the Cosmopolitan (17 of 45 threads, 38%) draw the highest negative shares; 43 of the Cosmopolitan's 45 service threads carry an opinion from a writer describing their own stay. The cards below quote the boards; each links to its thread.

Across the city, food and drink draw the most praise, and safety and cleanliness lean negative

Taken across all 53 resorts with opinions in the data, 330 of 410 threads on food and drink lean positive and 32 lean negative, more positive threads than any other topic. Rooms (256 positive and 81 negative of 432) and service (124 and 96 of 274) lean positive. Price and fees lean positive too, 165 to 98 of 336.

Cleanliness (57 negative and 36 positive of 126 threads) and safety (44 and 6 of 54) lean negative. Among writers reporting their own stay, cleanliness splits 32 negative to 30 positive. Cleanliness reaches 15 threads at one resort and loyalty at 3 among the 20 most discussed, so both are reported here for the city as a whole.

Room rates fell in August, and MGM's chief executive says Las Vegas is short of value customers

The citywide average daily rate fell 7.4% in August 2026 to $150.32, and revenue per available room fell 11.5%, the LVCVA reported. The Strip rate fell 11.4% to $153.15. The LVCVA tied August to a less packed event calendar and to Labor Day weekend, which fell in September this year. Through August the citywide rate was up 1.9% on 2025, at $183.60.

At MGM's Las Vegas Strip resorts, the second-quarter average daily rate was $242, against $252 a year earlier, at 93% occupancy. Bill Hornbuckle said the company's “very top end is very strong” and that Las Vegas is still short of “value customers,” Travelers Today reported. In May, 74% of nearly 800 visitors in a Truist Securities survey held positive views of Las Vegas as a value destination, Casino.org reported. The board data starts in May 2026, so it cannot say whether the price talk has changed with the rates.

The third-quarter reports with Las Vegas segments come from Boyd Gaming on October 22, Caesars Entertainment on October 27, MGM Resorts on October 28, Red Rock Resorts on November 3 and Wynn Resorts on November 5. The LVCVA had not published its September figures by October 15, 2026.

How the desk counted the threads

The data is the desk's store of public posts and comments from r/vegas, r/LasVegas, VegasMessageBoard, Vegas Fanatics, Bluesky and X, matched to 56 tracked resorts. Claude Sonnet 5.5 has read 46,571 of those posts and comments whole. For every resort the matcher found in an item, it gives one sentiment toward that resort (positive, negative, mixed or neutral), the topics the opinion concerns and the words that show it. The sentiment belongs to the resort mention, and every topic tagged on it carries that sentiment: a negative post about a room and its price counts negative on both. Posts the site suppresses (X replies, bot answers, solicitation and off-topic noise) are left out, and copies of one post count as one thread with every copy's comments.

For each resort and topic, a thread's verdict is the majority of its opinions, with a tie counted as mixed, so a long complaint thread moves a resort by one. Counted by mention, 20 of Caesars Palace's 39 service mentions and 12 of its 27 price mentions come from one r/vegas thread about a booking; counted by thread, Caesars Palace has 8 service threads and 10 price threads, under the floor of 15. The Venetian's count includes the Palazzo. Writers reporting their own visit gave 57% of the opinions.

No gold set covered the topic tags, so the desk checked 100 of them, 20 for each topic, drawn at random from the heat map's resorts. Claude Opus 5.5, drafting this report, read each item and labelled it; by those labels, 82 of the 100 tags were right on resort, topic and sentiment: 19 of 20 for service, 19 for food and drink, 16 for price, 14 for rooms and 14 for gaming. 13 of the 18 misses were on sentiment: the model gives one sentiment per resort mention, so a post praising a resort's location and faulting its rooms is mixed on both. Of 25 tags the model marked negative, 23 were negative on that topic; of 28 cases the desk read as negative, the model marked 23 negative and 5 mixed, and the heat map counts a mixed thread in a cell's total. A second reader, a separate Claude Opus 5.5 call that saw each item without the model's tags or the first labels, agreed with the first labels on whether the tag was right in 91 of 100 cases, and on all three questions in 88. Both readers are models; no person labelled the sample.

What the desk could not confirm

The model has scored nothing posted before May 13, 2026, so the report has no year-over-year comparison and no view of the first four months of 2026. Of the 5,569 opinions, 90% date from August onward, after the desk's August collection changes (X posts from August 16, forum and comment threads from late August), so the counts lean toward late summer.

The desk did not read each resort's own booking page, since MGM Resorts' sites refuse automated reads. The fee figures above come from ResortFeeChecker's October 2026 list, and the desk did not confirm parking charges.

The shares measure talk among people who chose to post, and the forums in the data draw many frequent visitors and gamblers. The hand check measured whether the model's tags are right; it did not measure topics the model left untagged.

Sources

• Vegas Signals, board sentiment by resort (the data this report counts)
• LVCVA, executive summary of tourism indicators, August 2026
• MGM Resorts International, second-quarter 2026 earnings release (SEC Exhibit 99.1)
• Travelers Today, Las Vegas room rates fall 4% as MGM bets big on luxury and live events
• Casino.org, Las Vegas value perceptions rebound (Truist Securities survey)
• Las Vegas Review-Journal via Hotel Online, How much are the resort fees charged on the Las Vegas Strip?
• Boyd Gaming, third-quarter 2026 results date (company release)
• Caesars Entertainment, third-quarter 2026 results date (company release)
• MGM Resorts, third-quarter 2026 results date (company release)
• Red Rock Resorts, third-quarter 2026 results date (company release)
• Wynn Resorts, third-quarter 2026 results date (company release)
• ResortFeeChecker, Las Vegas resort fees (last updated October 2026)