Luxor might be one of the easiest hotels in Las Vegas to make fun of.
It’s a giant black pyramid on the south end of the Strip, it opened back in 1993, and depending on who you ask online, you’d think staying there means sleeping inside an ancient Egyptian tomb with questionable carpet and a slot machine downstairs.
I’ve stayed at Luxor twice now — once in the summer of 2023 when Nikki and I got married in Vegas, and again in the winter of 2024 — and I have a pretty simple response whenever somebody tells me Luxor is a dump:
Compared to what?
Compared to Bellagio? Venetian? Wynn?
Yeah, obviously Luxor isn’t that.
But if we’re talking about Vegas hotels where I can get a clean room, a good pool, a casino I actually enjoy, plenty of food nearby and a decent price, Luxor is still one of my favorite value stays on the Strip.
And somehow, I always have a ridiculously good time gambling there.
Table of Contents
- Luxor Is Old-School Vegas in the Most Obvious Way Possible
- Checking In at Luxor and Using the $20 Trick
- My Luxor Tower Room Was Way Better Than I Expected
- Luxor Is Surprisingly Easy to Get Around
- The Luxor Casino Is One of My Favorites
- The Night I Played Blackjack for Hours on a $200 Buy-In
- Then I Somehow Won $965 Playing Top Dollar
- Luxor Has Some of the Best Cocktail Service I’ve Had in Vegas
- Dining at Luxor: Nothing Fancy, and That’s Fine
- Entertainment and Attractions at Luxor
- The Luxor Pool Is Better Than I Expected
- Is Luxor’s Location Bad?
- Who Should Stay at Luxor?
- Who Shouldn’t Stay at Luxor?
- How Much Would I Pay to Stay at Luxor?
- Is Luxor Outdated?
- Would I Stay at Luxor Again?
- Final Thoughts: Is Luxor Las Vegas Worth It?
- Luxor Las Vegas FAQ
Luxor Is Old-School Vegas in the Most Obvious Way Possible
Luxor opened in the early 1990s as one of the giant themed megaresorts that helped turn the Las Vegas Strip into what it is today.
The 30-story pyramid is still one of the most recognizable buildings in Vegas more than 30 years later.
That part hasn’t changed.
What has changed is how much Egyptian theming is actually left inside.
When Luxor originally opened, the place was basically Egyptian overload. There were themed attractions, statues, elaborate decorations and Egyptian details everywhere.
A lot of that is gone now.
You can still obviously tell you’re inside Luxor, especially when you look up into that enormous pyramid atrium, but the full-on Egyptian theme has slowly been stripped away over the years.
Personally, I wish they would have kept more of it.
Vegas is more fun when the hotels actually have some personality.
Checking In at Luxor and Using the $20 Trick
Both times I stayed at Luxor, my rooms were comped through MGM Rewards.
I still had to pay the resort fee, which at the time was around $40 a night, but for a Vegas hotel room that’s basically the kind of deal I’m looking for.
Both times I also tried the old $20 trick.
If you’ve never done it, there really isn’t much to it.
When I handed over my ID and credit card, I put a $20 bill between them and politely asked if there were any complimentary upgrades available.
Both times it worked.
Instead of staying inside the pyramid, I was moved into one of Luxor’s Tower rooms.
That was exactly what I wanted.
Because I have never stayed inside the pyramid, and I have absolutely no intention of starting now.
The Egyptians buried their dead in pyramids.
Now you want me to sleep in one?
I’m good, bro.
If you’re trying to figure out how MGM comps and status actually work, I broke down how much gambling it can take to reach MGM Gold status and whether chasing it even makes sense.
My Luxor Tower Room Was Way Better Than I Expected
Going into my first Luxor stay, I was mentally prepared for the stereotypical pyramid-room experience.
Slanted windows.
Slanted walls.
Riding those weird inclinators up the inside of the pyramid.
Instead, I ended up in a Tower King room with a Strip view and wet bar.
It was legitimately a really nice room.
The room was clean, the bed was comfortable, the bathroom was big and the shower had fantastic water pressure.
More importantly, the air conditioning worked.
That might sound like a stupid thing to praise, but spend an entire summer day walking around Las Vegas and then come back to a hotel room that won’t get cold.
You’ll understand.
There were a couple little annoyances. The toilet was loud. The exhaust fan was loud.
Nothing I cared about enough to ruin the room.
The furniture actually looked nicer than I expected too.
During one round of renovations, some furniture from Bellagio reportedly found its way into Luxor rooms.
So Luxor basically got Bellagio’s hand-me-downs.
I’m perfectly fine with that.
Give me rich people’s old furniture at Luxor prices.
Luxor still offers both Tower and Pyramid rooms today, and you can check the current room lineup directly on the official Luxor hotel website.
Luxor Is Surprisingly Easy to Get Around
One thing Luxor doesn’t get enough credit for is how easy the resort is to navigate.
I never felt lost there.
That sounds like a low bar until you stay at some Vegas resorts where you somehow walk 15 minutes and end up farther away from your room than when you started.
At Luxor, I could pretty quickly figure out where the casino was, where the Tower elevators were, where the restaurants were and how to get over to the neighboring properties.
And those neighboring properties are one of Luxor’s biggest advantages.
You have easy access toward Mandalay Bay and Excalibur, plus the free tram that connects the south Strip properties.
That means staying at Luxor basically gives you three completely different casino environments without having to make some massive Strip journey.
You can gamble at Luxor, head toward Mandalay Bay for a completely different atmosphere, then move toward Excalibur when you want cheaper, louder, more chaotic Vegas.
That is a huge advantage.
If you’re comparing south Strip value hotels, my Excalibur Hotel Las Vegas review shows why I also think Excalibur gets more hate than it deserves.
The Luxor Casino Is One of My Favorites
Here’s where I probably have more bias than normal.
I always have fun gambling at Luxor.
I don’t know what it is.
Maybe it’s the casino.
Maybe it’s the people I’ve ended up gambling with.
Maybe I’ve just gotten insanely lucky there a couple times.
Whatever it is, Luxor has produced some of my favorite gambling memories in Vegas.
That doesn’t mean the games are great.
The low-limit blackjack situation has generally been the same Strip bullshit you see at a lot of MGM properties.
Six-to-five blackjack.
I’ve seen $15 minimums that move to $25 when the casino gets busier, and I’m not going to sit here pretending 6:5 blackjack suddenly becomes good just because I like the casino.
It doesn’t.
Six-to-five blackjack still sucks.
But there is a difference between liking the rules and having a good time playing.
And I’ve had a hell of a time playing blackjack at Luxor.
The Night I Played Blackjack for Hours on a $200 Buy-In
A couple days after Nikki and I got married, I sat down at Luxor with a father-and-son duo and ended up playing blackjack with them for hours.
I bought in for $200.
That $200 lasted basically the entire session.
Eventually I started stacking enough money that I was pocketing black $100 chips as we played.
That’s always one of my favorite feelings at a blackjack table.
Once a black chip goes into the pocket, mentally that money doesn’t exist anymore.
The father and son were both winning too.
The dad was up thousands.
The whole table was having fun, drinks were flowing, everybody was winning and it turned into one of those blackjack sessions you remember even years later.
Eventually the drinks caught up with me.
I got drunk enough that I made a basic math mistake at the table.
At that point even drunk Mac had enough intelligence left to realize maybe it was time to stop gambling.
I walked away about $600 ahead plus my original $200 buy-in.
Not bad for sitting down with two hundred bucks and playing cards for hours.
It was also exactly the kind of session that makes gamblers start believing all kinds of stupid things, which is why I wrote about the biggest lies gamblers tell themselves.
Then I Somehow Won $965 Playing Top Dollar
Luxor also produced one of the dumbest slot wins I’ve ever had.
And I barely played slots back then.
I had been winning at blackjack and wandered into the high-limit room because I remembered hearing slot YouTubers talk about playing higher-denomination machines.
I spotted Top Dollar.
That was at least a game I understood.
So I decided to try it.
I put $100 into the machine and played the $5 denomination at the three-credit $15 max bet.
On my second spin, I hit the Top Dollar bonus.
I ended up cashing out $965.
And I immediately left.
I didn’t give the machine another chance to take it back.
Nikki had been playing slots most of the day and was basically looking at me like, how the hell did you just do that?
That is pretty much my entire slot career.
I barely knew what I was doing, hit something stupid and then spent the next few years convinced maybe I secretly understood slot machines.
I didn’t.
Luxor Has Some of the Best Cocktail Service I’ve Had in Vegas
Another reason I keep ending up back at Luxor is the drink service.
This has happened enough times that I don’t think it’s a coincidence anymore.
Nikki and I will be somewhere else playing for what feels like forever waiting for a cocktail waitress.
Eventually we get annoyed and move.
Then we end up back at Luxor.
Within five minutes somebody comes by taking drink orders.
And usually they’re back pretty quickly too.
Obviously casino drink service can change depending on where you’re sitting, how busy the property is and who happens to be working.
But across multiple visits, Luxor has consistently been one of the better casinos for drink service in my experience.
If I’m going to donate money to a casino, at least keep the drinks moving.
Dining at Luxor: Nothing Fancy, and That’s Fine
I’m probably the wrong person to ask if Luxor has some incredible culinary scene.
I’m not coming to Vegas looking for $200 tasting menus.
Give me food I like, enough of it, and don’t make me feel like I need to refinance my house.
For breakfast, we ate at Pyramid Café.
I got pancakes.
They were basic diner-style pancakes, but the portions were good and I left full.
That’s pretty much exactly what I wanted.
I also ate a lot of Slice of Vegas over at Mandalay Place.
It was good, affordable by Vegas standards and easy to get to.
That became one of those places where I knew I could just go grab something without turning every meal into an event.
The connection toward Mandalay Bay makes Luxor’s dining situation a lot better than it looks if you’re only checking the restaurants directly inside the hotel.
Entertainment and Attractions at Luxor
Luxor also has more going on than just gambling and hotel rooms.
One of the times we were there, Nikki and I went to see Fantasy.
That gives you another option without having to leave the property, and Luxor has also been home to attractions like the Titanic Artifact Exhibition.
For a cheaper hotel, I like that you can stay there and still have enough going on inside the building that you don’t immediately have to leave looking for something to do.
The Luxor Pool Is Better Than I Expected
Nikki got much more use out of the Luxor pool than I did.
She would go down in the morning and stay into the afternoon.
Meanwhile I managed about two hours.
That should tell you basically everything about the two of us.
She knows how to relax on vacation.
I’m trying to figure out where I’m gambling next.
But the time I did spend down there, I thought the pool area was really nice.
It was clean, there were plenty of lounge chairs and the crowd felt like a pretty normal mix of Vegas visitors.
It wasn’t some insane dayclub.
It wasn’t dead either.
It was just a good hotel pool.
The food and drinks around the pool weren’t cheap, but that’s Vegas.
Overall, I would absolutely consider the pool a positive, especially for families or couples who actually plan on spending part of their trip relaxing instead of gambling for 12 hours like idiots.
Is Luxor’s Location Bad?
This is another complaint I hear about Luxor all the time.
It’s too far south.
I understand the criticism.
If your entire Vegas trip revolves around walking out the front door and immediately being in the middle of Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Flamingo and all the center-Strip chaos, Luxor probably isn’t your hotel.
I just never found the location inconvenient.
We used the tram when it made sense.
We used Uber when we wanted to go farther.
And having Mandalay Bay and Excalibur right there gave us plenty to do without leaving the area.
That matters more to me than technically being in the geographic center of the Strip.
I also like being able to come back to somewhere a little quieter after being out all night.
Luxor isn’t a place where you step outside your room and immediately feel like you’re in the middle of the party.
For some people, that’s the downside.
For me, that can be a good thing.
If you want another MGM property in the same general part of the Strip, my MGM Grand Las Vegas review covers a much larger resort with a completely different feel.
Who Should Stay at Luxor?
Luxor makes the most sense to me for two groups:
Budget travelers and families.
If you want a reasonably priced Vegas hotel, don’t need luxury and care more about having a clean room and good amenities, Luxor makes a lot of sense.
Families also get a good pool, plenty of casual food and easy access to Excalibur and Mandalay Bay.
I’d also throw regular Vegas gamblers into the conversation.
If your room is mostly somewhere to shower, sleep and recover before heading back downstairs, spending huge money on the hotel doesn’t always make much sense.
That’s basically how I look at Vegas rooms.
I want them clean.
I want the bed comfortable.
I want working air conditioning.
Everything after that is a bonus.
If you want to compare Luxor with more Vegas hotel options, you can browse all of my Las Vegas casino and hotel reviews in one place.
Who Shouldn’t Stay at Luxor?
If you want luxury, Luxor probably isn’t for you.
If you want the party directly outside your hotel every second of the trip, Luxor probably isn’t for you either.
And if you’re the type of person who books one of the cheapest hotels on the Strip and then gets mad that it isn’t Venetian, I can probably save both of us some time.
Just stay somewhere else.
Luxor isn’t pretending to be a five-star resort.
I don’t judge it like one.
How Much Would I Pay to Stay at Luxor?
This is where Luxor gets really interesting to me.
I’ve seen Luxor around the $70-a-night range including resort fees depending on the dates.
At that kind of price?
I’d stay there without thinking twice.
Once the total starts getting much above $150 per night including the resort fee, I start comparing other properties.
Because at that price, depending on the dates, you might be able to get something I like more.
Luxor works best when Luxor is priced like Luxor.
Don’t pay premium-resort money for a value hotel.
Is Luxor Outdated?
Sure.
Parts of it are old.
The place opened in the 1990s.
I’m not expecting it to look like somebody finished construction yesterday.
But there’s a difference between old and dirty.
Every time I’ve stayed at Luxor, my room has been clean.
The casino has felt clean.
The common areas have felt clean.
And that matters much more to me than whether the furniture design is the newest thing on the Strip.
People sometimes talk about older Vegas hotels like the age alone makes them dumps.
I don’t buy that.
I’ve stayed in newer places I liked less.
Would I Stay at Luxor Again?
Absolutely.
If I were paying cash for a Vegas trip tomorrow and looking for value, Luxor would be right there with Flamingo and Excalibur among the first places I’d check.
That doesn’t mean Luxor is better than every other hotel in Vegas.
It means I know what I’m getting.
A clean room.
A comfortable bed.
A good pool.
A casino where I always seem to have fun.
Good cocktail service.
Easy access to three different resorts.
Plenty of food.
And usually a price that leaves me more money to lose downstairs.
That sounds like a pretty good Vegas hotel to me.
Final Thoughts: Is Luxor Las Vegas Worth It?
Whenever somebody tells me Luxor is a dump, my first question is still:
Compared to what?
If you’re comparing Luxor to Bellagio, Venetian or Wynn, then we’re having the wrong conversation.
Luxor isn’t trying to be those places.
But compare it to other value hotels on the Strip and suddenly the argument gets a lot more interesting.
I’ve stayed at Luxor twice.
I stayed there when I got married.
I turned a $200 blackjack buy-in into a night where I walked away $600 ahead.
I somehow won $965 playing a high-limit Top Dollar machine even though I wasn’t really a slot player.
I’ve spent afternoons at the pool, eaten way too much Slice of Vegas and repeatedly ended up back at Luxor because the drink service somewhere else pissed me off.
Those are the things I remember.
Not whether the wallpaper was trendy.
Not whether my hotel lobby looked expensive enough for Instagram.
Vegas doesn’t always need to be luxury.
Sometimes I just want a clean room, a fun casino and enough money left in my pocket to make another terrible gambling decision.
Luxor does that pretty damn well.
Luxor Las Vegas FAQ
Is Luxor Las Vegas a good hotel?
In my experience, yes. Luxor is an older value-focused Las Vegas resort, but both of my stays were clean and comfortable. I especially liked the Tower rooms, casino, pool and easy access to Mandalay Bay and Excalibur.
Is Luxor Las Vegas outdated?
Parts of Luxor definitely feel older, but I think there is a big difference between outdated and dirty. My rooms and the areas I used were always clean, and I would rather stay in an older clean hotel than pay more just because another property looks newer.
Should I stay in the Luxor Pyramid or Tower?
I personally prefer the Tower. Both times I stayed at Luxor I used the $20 trick and was upgraded out of the pyramid into a Tower room. I liked the normal room layout, wet bar and views. I have never stayed inside the pyramid and honestly don’t plan on starting.
Does Luxor have good blackjack?
The blackjack experience can be fun, but the low-limit rules I’ve personally encountered were usually 6:5, which I don’t like. I still had one of my favorite blackjack sessions ever at Luxor, but I wouldn’t confuse having a good time with getting great blackjack rules.
Is Luxor good for families?
I think it can be. The pool is solid, there are plenty of casual food choices, and the connections toward Excalibur and Mandalay Bay give families more options without constantly needing an Uber.
Is Luxor too far from the center of the Las Vegas Strip?
Luxor is definitely on the south end of the Strip, but I never found the location to be a major problem. We used the free tram when it made sense and Uber when we wanted to go farther north.
How much would I pay to stay at Luxor?
If I found Luxor around $70 a night including the resort fee, I would consider that a great value. Once the total starts getting much above $150 a night including the resort fee, I would start comparing other hotels.
