Two Way Hard Three | Las Vegas Casino & Design Blog

Posted by mike_ch

For all the flack it picks up for being the most corporate travel site, Vegas.com does have some useful information on it. Particularly relating to restaurant hours and, in the case of buffets, prices. It's useful when you're walking the strip and want a buffet, to know how much it costs and what's being served before you even head off the sidewalk into the resort.

This mobile site doesn't impart that information though, so mobile users will continue to have to rely on Google's caching/truncating web pages down to cell phone sized chunks.

Restaurant hours are helpful and it will be in the iPhone app (along with filtering out restaurants that aren't open, etc...).

For prices, I've always used a more Zagat style $$, $$$, $$$$, etc... for price representation since other than buffets, there's no one price for anything. Still, my setup is flexible enough that I could have actual prices for the buffets if I wanted to. Is that level of granularity, between something like $$ and $10 helpful?

Posted by mike_ch

Well, buffet prices and hours, along with the occasional ph#, is what I use them for. If I could get that stuff elsewhere, it would help.

Though, and I'm just saying this because you seem to focus on it a lot, it's personally useless to me if it's just available in iPhone-only form.

No doubt I'm focusing on iPhone/iPod Touch applications from here on out. There's a ton of reasons for that but in a nutshell, it's because it's a rich environment that lets me do some really cool things and has a wide audience.

That said though, I've had a WAP site and email retrieval service for years and I'm not removing them and I might even consider some simple enhancements if I thought there was a market for them.

The details are here:
http://www.ratevegas.com/pocket_vegas/

Traffic on the iPhone site is about 50 times that of the WAP site.

Either way, a lot of these little tidbits of information transcend platforms and they're interesting to me either way.

Personally I don't really need specifics down to dollar amount. The thing that annoys me though is that on some sites it is hard to know what a dollar sign translates to. Does $=10? or $$=20, etc. As long as I know that I can get a per person dinner under 20 or under 50 or blow the wad over 100, that's enough info for me.

I sometimes include a legend but yeah, I do:

$ - $10
$$ - $20
$$$ - $30
$$$$ - $40
$$$$$ - $50+

and in the case of restaurants, that's 'average cost per person, not including wine/booze'.

Posted by DavidF

Although they are slow to come to the Party at least they are doing a better job than the Hotels - the only two that have mobile sites on the strip (that I know of at least) are Wynn and Bellagio, and even then only Wynn's auto-redirects to the mobile site from their home page URL. Eith Bellagio's (which is not iPhone friendly), you have the know the link, and specifically point your mobile browser to it.

I do think it'll be handy. Sometimes all you need to know is basic information, and to have that right at your fingertips is pretty key.