The big news out of Vegas is mostly about rising ticket prices for entertainment. The new Celine Dion show at Caesars Palace has a top price of $220 a seat. One suspects the premise here is along the lines of, "Well, some people will pay it, if only to show off. And then the seats we don't sell at that price, we can give away as comps and people will think, 'Wow, I'm getting a $220 comp!' Best of all, it will make the overpriced tickets that aren't quite as overpriced seem reasonable." These would be the seats for $166.50, $143.50, or $102. Hard to believe they could charge more than a hundred bucks a seat in a town where people grab up funbooks full of coupons for a dollar off the lunch buffet. But apparently they can.
The Las Vegas Advisor has done its annual survey of show prices and concluded that the average ticket now goes for $45.91. That's more than five bucks up from just a year ago — though lower than it was in 2000, a year when there was a temporary shortage of cheap shows at cheap hotels. There are now plenty — not that you'd want to go see them — and they distort the stats a bit. The average price for a ticket you might want to buy — say, for one of the Cirque Du Soleil shows — can be over a hundred dollars. Lance Burton's show at the Monte Carlo is $55-60 a seat and it'll run you $65, at least in theory, to see Penn & Teller at the Rio. The trick is to look for discount coupons. It's real easy to find a $10 discount ticket for Penn & Teller (there's even one on the Rio website) and when business is slow, the hotel spreads around even better bargains. There are also some good, low-price afternoon shows (Mac King at Harrah's, Ronn Lucas at the Rio) which weren't included in the Las Vegas Advisor price survey.
I used to marvel at the folks who'd do Vegas armed with every discount coupon book they could find, eating breakfast at an inconvenient hotel at an inconvenient time because they had a coupon for a buck off on the French Toast. I prided myself that I was too sophisticated to mess with that kind of thing and lectured that if one were to just lose twenty bucks less at the gaming tables (i.e., stop playing five minutes sooner), one could save a lot more money than being a slave to coupons. But I think, in the future, I'm going to be a bit less quick to disdain their value. On some transactions, it's getting to be like buying a new car: Only a dummy pays the sticker price.