Travel

Review: World’s Busiest Hotel

Las Vegas is home to some of the biggest and most expensive hotels in the world, with the Venetian Hotel listed as the busiest and most popular on the planet. Located on the ‘strip’, it is a replica of the Italian city Venice, complete with its own canals and gondolas. Aside from the Venetian’s 7000 rooms, it is also home to a huge casino as well as America’s highest grossing restaurant. The number of visitors to the hotel is astounding and it apparently attracts more tourists than the real Venice does.

The documentary takes a close look at the 8500 staff who work to keep the Venetian in business. The maids are stretched to the limit, with only minutes to carry out 83 tasks per room before new guests arrive at the hotel. The cleaners and managers who make sure that the public areas of the hotel are tidy are rushed off their feet too. If someone is sick in the lobby – which happens pretty often in Vegas – it is cleaned up within seconds by a team of workers armed with sawdust and brooms.

Olivier, head chef at the hotel restaurant, explains the logistics behind catering for so many guests. He explains how they use trucks to transport food from the kitchen to the conference rooms, laughing about the time when they needed a police convoy to transport a cooked breakfast to thousands of guests. The amount of food they are cooking and preparing is unbelievable, although the fact that they have a two acre kitchen probably helps.

The programme also looks at the volume of guests arriving and leaving the hotel. Hundreds leaving the Venetian are shown waiting with their cases at the front doors, where their taxis, limos and coaches are directed by staff in a fashion usually seen at airports. The guests checking out of the hotel are soon replaced though, with around 600 people checking in every hour.

‘World’s Busiest Hotel’ was a fascinating look at the logistics behind running such a huge operation and was well portrayed by the narrator. The facts and figures emphasise the popularity of Las Vegas and why such a large number of the top hotels in the world lie on this four mile stretch of Nevada. The Venetian is certainly impressive and will undoubtedly encourage people to visit, however I thought the hotel could be seen as a little impersonal. Huge four and five star hotels are well decorated, clean and popular which ultimately attracts a higher number of guests, but there is an advantage visiting smaller hotels where the staff will remember your name and where you are from. The amenities and customer service are clearly well received at the Venetian, but the figures suggest that guests are numbers rather than names.

Click to comment
To Top