I stayed at the Venetian for a breezy touch and go 2 days this Nov. Macau is usually touch and go for most tourists – show me anyone who stays for a week or more in Macau…
I found The Venetian to be too many things at the same time (Hotel, Casino, Shopping, Movies, Live Shows…phew!). Anyone entering the hotel from the West Gate will probably get a feeling that they are entering a trading floor on Wall Street than a Hotel lobby. Probably 200 buses and 200 taxis at any point in time fill this land mass called West Gate. I am reminded that the Venetian was built to handle epic proportions to scale.
Epic proportion it is. Takes me 15 mins to walk to my room from the reception lobby; I needed to carry a map at all times to figure out how do I get back to my room if I am at the Casino or someplace else within the Hotel. Even the sheer number of lovely ladies waiting outside the gates for prospective inquiries indicates that this place is the Goliath of Hotels in Macau. Now, it will start becoming difficult if I ask whether you prefer a Hotel or a City to live in….
And that’s why I could only muster 3 stars for this review. If you want a little acknowledgment of yourself in a Hotel that you matter, this isn’t it. You can play golf on one level, go to the casino on another and even ride a Venetian canal on a boat at a different level, but the feeling it gives you is more of an amusement park than a Hotel. My first thought was that it probably is Dubai + Genting rolled into one.
And if you chip through the surface and look for details, it stops being a Venetian or a Hotel. For example, the rooms are large, functional, lavish but distasteful (the ones I stayed in) – where is the influence of Venice in the rooms?
Long story short: Go there for the amusements and the events and take the free tours through the millions of buses and cabs which throng it daily; even spend some good time and money on its premises. But if I was you and looking for a good place to stay, I’d choose some other place and definitely save the money to spend on myself later at the Casino 🙂
