W Las Vegas Hotel Review

The W Las Vegas is one of the newest Vegas properties, as Starwood did a makeover on the SLS’s Lux Tower and renovated it into a new W property just last year. It’s very much a “hotel within a hotel” but you’ll definitely feel like you’re at the W when you arrive to your tower. Here’s a look at my recent stay at the W Las Vegas and my take on the property.

Location

The Las Vegas W hotel is located on the north side of The Strip near the iconic Stratosphere so it’s a little further removed from places like the Bellagio, New York, New York, and others but it’s also located right at the SLS Station for the Las Vegas Monorail so you can easily make your way to wherever you’re trying to go. While this is a smaller resort, it still has plenty to offer in terms of dining, drinks, and great customer service, as I’ll show below.

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Check-in

If you’re driving in, when you arrive you’ll pull into the entrance for the SLS but once you enter the drive way look out for the W signs and they’ll lead you to where you need to park for the hotel. It’s a little hidden but just locate the signs and you’ll be alright.

The entrance to the hotel is of course a little flashy and decked out with W signs that capture the casino themes in various ways.

Once inside, you’ll see the bar and lounge area straight ahead and the check-in desks will be on your left. You’ll notice that this is a smaller hotel compared to the large Vegas resorts, which can actually be a great thing. When we stayed on a busy holiday weekend, the hotel traffic remained pretty minimal so we were able to avoid the hustle and bustle that we later found at the Cosmopolitan. Sometimes it’s nice to get away from the crowds, especially at a place like Las Vegas.

The check-in area is a bit small too with only three to four desks operating at a time.

Upon checking in, the staff was exceptionally friendly and professional just as I’ve come to expect from W hotels. They notified me that as an SPG Platinum Member, I’d been upgraded from a Spectacular Room to the Marvelous Suite, which was great since this was my first stay in 2017 as an SPG Platinum member.

I was given the choice of 500 SPG points or a breakfast voucher for $15 each for me and Brad. Since I value 500 SPG points at about $12, I chose the breakfast voucher worth $30.  In addition, we were given two $15 drink coupons, which we used to to try two signature cocktails (see below).

So that was a total of $60 worth of perks in addition to the upgrade just for being Platinum.

And finally, we were given a couple of tokens for the fortune teller machine located near the bathrooms on the first floor. I guess it was broken because it told us we were in for some big winnings that night….

From there we were off to our room on the 25th floor.

The dim hallways are a bit trippy and have an almost eerie feel to them with their design.

The room

The Marvelous Studio Suite is extremely spacious. If you like having big, wide-open rooms you’ll love this suite.

The king bed is in front of a decorated curtain that stretches across 3/4 of the wall. The curtains, which hang from small hooks at the top of the walls, are interesting and I don’t think I’ve seen that type of decor in any other hotel.

The bed was cozy and I never had any issues with room temperature, noise, or anything like that so it was an all-around great stay from a comfort standpoint.

One of my favorite features of the suite was the overhanging ceiling mirror. I don’t think I’ve ever had a mirror over a bed in a hotel, but I thought it was a pretty intriguing feature.

The light fixtures in the room are interesting, too, and they come with these weird moldings that look like globs of melted wax.

I also liked the chandelier having over the chase lounge chair.

There’s also a gigantic mirror on one of the walls. Suffice it to say, if you’re in need/want of mirrors from all angles you’ll find them in this hotel.

From the bed you face the wall with a large TV and a desk under it. Like the wall behind the bed, this wall is also decorated with a long curtain that stretches wall to wall.

And as usual, the room comes stocked with various snacks and alcoholic drinks. The water bottles with the W label on them are complimentary and you should be able to request additional bottles at any time.

We had the oppurtunity to try out a cheese plate and some champagne from the W and the cheeses were delicious.

I got to relax on one of their ultra-comfy robes for a while (which are extra soft) and have a glass or two of champagne. Brad took this photo with me sitting on the chase lounge and the couch made me look like a little hobbit enjoying a luxurious hotel.

The bathroom

The bathroom was definitely a highlight of the room, too. The sinks were a bit shallow and the faucets were small, making it a challenge to do certain things like filling up a (filtered) water bottle, but I still enjoyed the look.

This room definitely had one of my favorite showers out of any hotel I’ve ever stayed at. It’s huge and comes with two shower heads, one a rainfall shower head and the other one a standard shower head. In addition to all of the space, another unique feature is the window and blinds.

Depending on what you’re trying to see (or not see), you can adjust these blinds from outside the shower and inside your suite.

W Las Vegas Bar

The W Las Vegas bar and lounge, known as “The Living Room” is full of swanky lighting, decor, and seating. It’s not huge but it’s big enough. You can come here for drinks or even coffee or tea.

In my experience, W hotels have superb mixologists and bar tenders and so of course this W in Las Vegas had to continue that trend. Our drink coupons that we received due to our SPG Platinum status covered both drinks (which were listed at $15), so this was a great way to save some additional cash.

The back of the bar has more swank to it and looks like there might be areas that you could reserve for a group if you wanted.

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W Las Vegas Pool

The W Las Vegas has a nice pool area that stays open from 9am to sunset. In the middle of the day there was a decent amount of guests enjoying the pool as you can tell from this photo.

In the middle of the pool is a bar area.

And of course this is Vegas so you can rent cabanas for the right price.

There’s a long pool area that I wasn’t sure if it was heated or not, but it’s very narrow.

And at the entrance of the pool area, there’s a giant “rubber ducky” that’s slightly creepy to me.

The gym

I’d read that the W shared a gym with the SLS but that was not correct because the gym is definitely branded for the W. When I tried it during the middle of the day, there weren’t any other guests in the gym.

It’s a top-notch gym with all of the state of the art equipment that any gym rat would need.

There’s even an area with a punching bag (and speed bag) and you can even pick up a pair of boxing gloves for your work out.

You’ll also find a lot of different retro-body builder life-size photos plastered around the gym, with a place for you to put your face and admire what you’d look like with the perfect physique –assuming that’s your definition of “perfect.” 😉

There’s a nice locker room next to the gym with a steam room and showers, too. I’m not sure why you’d want to shower here when you have a perfectly private shower in your room but nevertheless it’s an option.

I heard great things about the Away Spa but I didn’t get the chance to try it out.

Restaurants

The W shares the restaurants, casino, and other bars with the SLS. When you venture out of the W’s bar area, you’ll come into the area where you can find the different restaurants and bars. Some of the restaurants are found within the casino.

To use your breakfast voucher, you’ll head to the Northside Cafe and Chinese Kitchen (full menu here). It’s open 24 hours a day and serves up comfort food with a separate menu featuring Chinese cuisine (a little odd I know).

I woke up with plans to eat a healthy breakfast that morning but my sweet tooth got the best of me and I found myself ordering their famous hazelnut-chocolate french toast, while Brad went for something more hearty: the steak and eggs.

For a late lunch we tried out 800 Degrees Neapolitan Pizzeria.

We went with a pepperoni and garlic pizza that was very tasty.

There are plenty of other places to try like the Bazaar Meat by José Andrés steakhouse, Katsuya sushi, and other places that serve up everything from burgers to Mediterranean dishes. You can find out more about those places here.

Overall, from what we tried, we were pretty pleased with the quality of the food so I doubt you can go wrong eating at the restaurant.

Final word

This was a great stay at the W Las Vegas. The hotel is on the smaller side when compared to more iconic Vegas resorts but that can work to its advantage since you can avoid the crowds. The rooms have unique decor and I loved the wide open suite and shower set-up. With plenty of dining and drinking options to choose from and great location at the SLS Station, I think the W Las Vegas has a lot going for it and I certainly enjoyed my stay.