We booked three rooms for three nights at THEhotel and here's the low-down:\n\nGOOD NEWS - \n1.  Nice rooms with lots of space, 1.5 bathrooms, comfy bed and relatively quiet.\n2.  No smoking hotel and common areas.\n3.  No three-mile walk through a brain-numbing casino to registration desk, elevators, etc.\n4.  Attentive staff, particularly our bellman (Eric?).\n\nBAD NEWS - \n1.  We booked nine nights total and one of the rooms ... literally .... faced a concrete wall!\n2.  One of our three rooms had a bathroom that had not been cleaned, at all, after the departure of the previous guest.  YUCK!\n3.  In-room coffee COSTS $4 a cup.  WTH!\n4.  You are charged if you use space in the mini-bar fridge to cool anything you bring into the room.  WTH x 2!!\n5.  Poolside seating at the Mandalay pool is FULL SUN EXPOSURE only.  If you want or need an umbrella, get out your wallet.  On the Sunday we were visiting the pool, umbrellas were available ONLY in a roped-off area with padded lounges.  Lounges were \"renting\" for $25 each and umbrellas were renting for $50 each.  WTH x 3!!!\n6.  If you want to use the hotel's \"free\" cardio room, get a map, a compass and put on your walking shoes.  At least you will burn calories getting to the wimpy little cardio center!  If you want anything other than the usual cardio machines, be prepared to pay for it ... $15 or $25 per day, depending on what level you want.\n\nAs Robert DeNiro points out at the end of the movie, \"Casino,\" \n\n\"The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots. In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. And if you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday. Today, it's all gone. You get a whale show up with four million in a suitcase, and some twenty-five-year-old hotel school kid is gonna want his Social Security Number.\"\n\nBottom line, it's Vegas baby.  You go expecting more than you will ever get and you come away promising yourself you'll never go back.  But if you are like me, you will go again sooner or later, hoping things will be different and somehow you'll be treated like something other than what we all really are in Vegas .... cattle in the herd.