Excalibur Vegas Stay: Easy Survival Guide

Excalibur Vegas Stay: Essential Survival Guide for the Excalibur resort in Las Vegas

If you want to avoid hating this Vegas ‘budget’ Strip resort (or being ‘broken’ by it) you need to follow these steps:

1 – if you truly (but truly!) do not care about the room you may be assigned, or the bed you may be sleeping in, or the quality (or lack thereof) of the mattress, or the view from your room window, etc, then skip to point 5 of this Excalibur Vegas stay survival list.

2 – if you care about having some sort of a view from your room window, you need to specify this at check in. Bear in mind that you may be assigned a low-floor ‘courtyard’ room (facing the inside of the Excalibur) which means that all you’ll be seeing is concrete. Inbound-looking rooms are usually quieter at Excalibur, but (unless you are on a really high floor, say 22 and above) the lack of view can feel claustrophobic to some. I was told that all even number rooms face the inside.

3 – The Resort Tower has still quite a few old mattresses and they often feel as if you are sleeping on concrete at best (unless they are lumpy or have ‘valleys’ in them, which makes it even worse). The ‘remodeled’ Royal Tower rooms seem to be generally smaller, though floors 1-15 have very comfortable beds, which almost make you forget that you are staying at Excalibur altogether.  In fact, they have newly remodeled rooms with modern touch ups and very comfortable beds.  These are not on all floors so you need to ask.  In my opinion, they are well worth the upgrade.  So, if you want to sleep comfortably (on a soft, higher-end mattress with higher-end linen rather than cheap motel-style sheets and covers), you may have to pay the extra 10 to 15 dollars a night for the upsale you will be forced to endure at check-in. Remember that a comfortable room may induce you to stay in it more, which may mean less time in the smoke-filled casino, where you are more-likely-than-not to lose money. If you want to try and cheap out by staying in a Resort Tower older room with a concrete-inspired mattress, you may eventually feel desperate enough to want to change rooms, which is always a hassle (especially in less-than-luxurious resorts). 

4 – Following point 3, if you are told you can request a ‘mattress-topper’ (often referred to as a ‘foamy’) to soften the concrete-style mattress of many Resort Tower rooms, beware that: a) they don’t have king sizes, only queen sizes (something they omit to tell you but that you will find out after hours of trial and error) and b) they are often filthy, so filthy that the room cleaner did not want to touch it (in my own personal experience).

5 – If you switch rooms trying to improve your Excalibur Vegas stay, check for any items you may have potentially left behind: check, check and check again. If you leave them in the room, they are as good as lost (I was told it’s particularly bad during the evening). I left my charger in room n.1, realized this only 90 minutes after the swap and, when I phoned customer service, all I was told was: ‘we cannot ask the new guests (if they found your charger) because it’s too late at night’. Ok, there’s so much wrong with this sentence, which essentially suggests that no cleaner goes through the room enough to find items left behind OR that nobody cares about reporting such items OR that somehow items get ‘lost’ in the Excalibur maze, one way or the other. As I write this, I still remember leaving an item behind at Bellagio: not only did they notify me of it when I had not even realized it myself, but they sent me the item by mail at no charge (I was on my way home when they contacted me); Excalibur, like many ‘budget’ Vegas resorts (usually those belonging to large chains), is not like that, to put it as diplomatically as I can put it.

6 – Some rooms have plenty of sockets whilst others don’t; always bring your own extension chord with a multi-plug option.

7 – Bring some disinfecting wipes (and this is probably advisable in every hotel you go to): room turnaround in Las Vegas is very fast (well, it was at Excalibur) and I find it hard to believe that surfaces get truly cleaned: besides the obvious stains and dirt spots you will see, there’s a lot more you won’t see. Enough said.

8 – Check-in can be painfully slow; the VIP check in section can also be slow, being one sad line at the end of the registration area. Be prepared for the most crowded place you’ve ever seen, like a badly managed train station, with people practically camping on the floor whilst their traveling companion checks in.  You will enjoy the widest range of coolers on display by many checking-in guests, giving you an idea of what a true Excalibur Vegas stay is all about by frugal guests, and pre-warning you that the ice buckets in the rooms here are very small.

9 – On a positive note, they don’t seem to be too strict about the early check in charge (especially on low-traffic times/low season).

10 – Most Excalibur rooms don’t have a bath tub. So take a bath at home, since you won’t enjoy it during your Excalibur Vegas stay!

11 – Don’t expect to be watching great HD channels in your rooms. The selection is limited and the picture quality is not the best. On a positive note, the wi-fi quality is very good, with great speed.

12 – Unless you can sleep through any noise you can imagine, bring ear plugs.  For some reason many Excalibur guests seem to want to practice wild screaming and heavy door-slamming late at night (the later the better, it seems), something you will hear very clearly through the not-sound-proofed door.  On a positive note, the smoking problem which used to pervade Excalibur room corridors seems to have disappeared.

13 – Following on point 12, make sure your room is far from the house-keeping access door; this area is as crowded and loud as a fish market peopled by hard-of-hearing individuals; the crazy yelling to-and-from starts at 9am and it will pervade your dreams until you wake up out of desperation.

14 – Resort credit. Don’t start charging your room like crazy: be very meticulous when you ask Registration what is and what is not covered by the resort credit: most places are not. We have a full page on Resort Credit Bewares which apply to your Excalibur Vegas stay.

15 – Slot Tournaments. Unless you are one of the lucky 5 who win ‘big’ (out of around 150 people), you may be only winning 100 or 200 dollars in free-play, which sounds like a lot but it is generally not so. Free play, for mysterious reasons we can only speculate on, never seems to yield good payouts. In other words, slot machines seem to mysteriously become even ‘tighter’ when using one’s Free play. 200 dollars in free play may yield only about 20 real dollars in ‘winnings’, running the risk that you will want to play more thus squandering much more of your hand-earned money (which is what Free play is designed to achieve anyway). We have a page on Slot Tournaments Warnings and a page on Free play ‘Bewares’, for those who don’t know much about this.

Now, let’s recap the good points about Excalibur:  1) excellent wi-fi throughout the resort, including the gym (a rarity in Vegas) 2) the gym has hand sanitizers as well as a great supply of bottled water (purified), so you don’t have to share the water dispenser germs accumulated by every single frugal traveler filling up his own water bottle  3) the spa is only 10 dollars extra  4) you get a lot for your gambling here. So, your Excalibur Vegas stay can be a success, if you follow the above!

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