Gone are the days of the cheap buffet

Caesars Palace can satisfy your urge to spend $250 per ticket on a show; that’s the going rate for extravaganzas featuring Elton John and Bette Midler.

And if a Big Mac is too down-market for you, then head over to Daniel Boulud Brasserie inside the Wynn Las Vegas for a $120 double-truffle burger.

What we can’t help you track down, though, is a $6.99 steak or a $2.99 buffet.

That’s because those Vegas inventions have gone the way of the Dunes and the Desert Inn. In their place are five-star and five-diamond restaurants, hotel rooms that’ll cost you a mortgage payment and Broadway-level show prices.

The move toward luxury in Las Vegas isn’t merely a cynical ploy to shake down tourists for ever-more dollars, experts say. The upscaling of Las Vegas is also about survival.

As video poker and slot machines proliferated in racetracks and casinos around the country in the 1980s and 1990s, resorts on the Strip needed to add something new to their offerings, said David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“No one will fly for four hours to play a slot machine anymore,” says Schwartz, “but they will fly four hours to stay in a luxury hotel.”

So when did Las Vegas begin its march toward luxury?

Anthony Curtis, president of tourist-advice center LasVegasAdvisor.com, pegs the evolution’s start to the opening of The Mirage in 1989.

The hotel’s developer, Steve Wynn, built a resort that emphasized fine dining, high-end hotel rooms and nongaming attractions such as animal habitats to move the property away from a heavy reliance on gambling win. Legend had it The Mirage would need to take in $1 million a day to profit — and it did so “with ease,” Curtis says. Other local resort operators took notice.

“They saw little price resistance from consumers at The Mirage,” Curtis says. “These corporations and people who run the big casinos, it’s their job to extract money from tourists. They looked at The Mirage and said, ‘Wow, we don’t just have to get gamblers in the casino to make a profit.’ The upscaling of Las Vegas was really about making money in other departments — dining, shopping, entertainment and rooms.”

Thus did a spate of higher-end casinos come online beginning in the late 1990s. Among the luxe new properties were Mandalay Bay and Wynn’s Bellagio in 1998, and The Venetian in 2000. Out went $59-a-night Strip rooms, and in came $200- and $300-a-night suites.

Schwartz believes Las Vegas’ luxury beginnings actually were forged in 1966, when Caesars Palace opened. Caesars Palace was the first resort to ditch the standard casino-nightclub amenity package and go instead for an “immersive” tourism experience.

Caesars Palace today continues to typify luxury in Las Vegas. Its Forum Shops is the nation’s highest-grossing shopping center. It continues to add posh hotel rooms; the 648-square-foot deluxe accommodations in its two-year-old Augustus tower come with multiple flat-screen televisions, spa tubs and high-speed Internet access. The cost: anywhere from $300 to $780 a night on weekends.

But Caesars Palace and its high-end confreres are hardly the last word in local luxury.

A coming wave of megaresorts promises to push the city to new high-end heights. The Encore at Wynn Las Vegas, MGM Mirage’s CityCenter, and Boyd Gaming Corp.’s Echelon all promise costly rooms, boutique shops and fine restaurants.

If budget offerings on the Strip are an endangered species, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, industry watchers say.

Las Vegas has thrived by evolving with consumers’ tastes, Curtis says, and what many consumers want today is a luxury experience.

Besides, think about what Las Vegas would be today if it hadn’t gone high-end.

“It would be a bigger version of Laughlin,” Schwartz says.

The upscaling of the Strip also could benefit the rest of Las Vegas. Consumers in search of cheaper hotel rooms already are heading downtown and to locals casinos outside the resort corridor, giving those areas a boost, Schwartz says.

Nor is it altogether accurate to say that Las Vegas has completely surrendered its status as a good vacation value, Curtis says. A consumer who has $5,000 to drop on a trip will find that her dollar goes a lot farther in Las Vegas than it would go in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Tokyo or London, among other world destinations, he says.

And a quick search of travel sites on the Internet will show that packages combining air travel and hotel rooms can offer similar price ranges at properties as disparate as the Excalibur and Bellagio, Schwartz says. Vacationers just need to be savvy in their research, and they might need flexibility in their travel dates as well.

In the long run, where there’s demand in a segment, there’ll be options, Schwartz says. If local resort operators sense a large, untapped market of budget travelers looking for deals, they’ll build to accommodate them.

“Letting the market meet consumers’ needs has really been the formula for Las Vegas’ success,” Schwartz says.

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512.