WHAT DOES A MORE INTENTIONAL TRIP TO VEGAS LOOK LIKE? BY ALANA HOPE LEVINSON
hen you’re sober, a trip to Las Vegas raises eyebrows. It’s hard to separate our perception of the city from its pop culture depictions— most of which involve blackouts, ill-advised quickie weddings, and gambling away one’s life’s savings into the wee hours of the morning. But increasingly, my kind is being catered to at spots like the Vdara , a game- and smoke-free hotel a little bit off the strip, where they offer the “Stay Well” program, a fleet of suites with wellness tech from Delos, the Cleveland Clinic, and Dr. Deepak Chopra. W
method, plus custom IV therapies and golf at Wynn Golf Club , the only course on the Las Vegas Strip.) It’s not clear how popular these programs are, but their sheer existence would have been out of the question just a decade ago. As people are drinking and partying less than ever before, Las Vegas attempts to adapt in order to survive. Back in 2003, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority announced, “What happens here, stays here,” the slogan that’s been locked in our cultural imagination ever since—especially with movies like The Hangover portraying it at its most extreme. The slogan remained the same until 2020, when the city changed it to something that doesn’t evoke vice: “What happens here, only happens here.”
These special rooms include perks like natural memory foam mattresses, guided meditations, air and water purification, a dawn simulation alarm clock, a shower infused with vitamin C, and the use of hypoallergenic cleaning products. (Other hotel groups are rolling out similar suites. For example, Wynn Living Well offers trainers who deal in Tom Brady and Alex Guerrero's TB12
FUN FACT
Though this might seem like a lost cause, Las Vegas’ history is littered with attempts at reinvention. In the ’90s, after a difficult economic period, Vegas rebranded itself as “family-friendly.” The marketing worked, at least for my family: Every May, we would travel to the Excalibur Hotel and Casino, a then-new $290-million-dollar hotel built around a King Arthur theme, explicitly featuring fun for the
Las Vegas reps asked us to drop the Sin City moniker, calling it "outdated and kind of cheesy," but we really liked this title.
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