DESTINATION · LAS VEGAS
Las Vegas, and the fee on top of the fee
The room rate is not the room rate. A resort fee of £36 to £43 a night goes on at the desk, parking is charged separately again, and a cheap-looking week can end up half as much again.
- Airport
- LAS · USA
- On sale
- 12 of 12 months
- Airport spread
- £642 across 10 UK airports
Today's best fare
London Las Vegas
£525 £560 −6%
Measured on a live search, refreshed hourly. Prices move — confirm on Kiwi.com.
Departure airports
£642 apart, depending where you take off
Every UK airport searched separately for this destination, cheapest first, as a return fare for one person with taxes in. Manchester to Las Vegas and London to Las Vegas are not the same route and we do not price them as one. Each figure is a fare of one stop at most — the same limit as the price at the top of this page — and each is that airport's own cheapest week, so the dates change from row to row. Every link opens on the dates its price was found on.
10 of 10 airports have a fare to Las Vegas within one stop today. The rest either need two connections and most of a day to get there — which we will not print a price for — or did not answer the last search. London covers Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, City and Southend in one search.
The year, month by month
When Las Vegas is worth the airfare
Average daytime high for each month. The greyed months are ones we refuse to advertise — not because they are cheap, but because the place cannot deliver what the page promises.
- Jan 14°
- Feb 17°
- Mar 21°
- Apr 26°
- May 31°
- Jun 38°
- Jul 41°
- Aug 40°
- Sep 35°
- Oct 27°
- Nov 19° today's fare
- Dec 14°
12 of 12 months on sale. No closed season.
Las Vegas sits in the Mojave at six hundred metres, which gives it the widest annual temperature range of anywhere on this board. It is a desert basin: dry air, almost no cloud, and a ground surface that radiates the day back through the evening. The peak of the year is not merely hot but genuinely hazardous for anyone walking any distance outdoors, and the city responds by moving everything indoors and air-conditioning it to the point of discomfort.
Winter is the surprise for British visitors. Nights fall close to freezing, the pools at most hotels close or go unheated, and a jacket is needed after dark — none of which appears in the marketing. What you get in exchange is a walkable Strip, clear desert light and the lowest room rates of the year outside the convention calendar.
The two shoulder stretches are the answer, and the thing that actually determines price here is not weather at all but the convention diary. A large trade show fills forty thousand rooms and triples the rate for that week; the same room in the gap between two shows is a fraction of it. Check the Las Vegas Convention Center calendar before fixing dates — it moves prices more than the season does, and it is public.
Add the fees before comparing rates
A resort fee of £36 to £43 a night plus parking is not in the price you are shown. Two hotels quoting the same rate can differ by two hundred pounds across a week.
The case for it
Why Las Vegas
Las Vegas exists because Nevada legalised gambling in 1931 and because the Hoover Dam gave it water and power. What grew from that is a city of two and a half million people in the Mojave desert whose entire economy is built around six kilometres of boulevard. The scale is the thing photographs fail at: the hotels on the Strip are among the largest buildings in the world by room count, and walking between two of them takes far longer than they look.
It also works as a base for the American West in a way British visitors underuse. The Grand Canyon's south rim is a long day out, Zion and Death Valley are closer, and the Hoover Dam is forty minutes away. Fly-drive itineraries through the national parks almost all begin here, because the airport sits ten minutes from the Strip, the hire cars are among the cheapest in the country, and Nevada, Utah and Arizona meet within a morning's drive.
The reservation is the pricing model, and it is aggressive in a way that catches out visitors who booked on rate alone. Resort fees are compulsory, added nightly at check-in, and cover a wifi and gym package you did not ask for; parking is charged on top at most Strip hotels; and the drinks are no longer free while you play. A room advertised at ninety pounds a night can arrive at a hundred and forty.
On the ground
Five things worth doing
- 01
Walk the Strip once, at night, then stop
It is free and it is the thing itself: the fountains at the Bellagio every fifteen minutes, the volcano, the canal at the Venetian. Do it after dark when the heat has gone. What nobody says is how far it is — six kilometres end to end, with pedestrian bridges that force long detours, so plan on the monorail or a rideshare for at least one leg. One evening covers it; a second adds nothing that the first did not.
- 02
Take the Hoover Dam power plant tour
Forty minutes south-east, and one of the great engineering objects of the twentieth century — 6.6 million tonnes of concrete poured continuously for two years. The visitor centre alone is $15 (about £12); the power plant tour that takes you inside to the generators is $25 to $30 (£20 to £24) and is the one worth having. Parking is $10. Go early: there is no shade on the dam and the crowds build sharply through the morning.
- 03
Decide honestly about the Grand Canyon
Coach day trips run $80 to $130 (about £63 to £103) and small-group ones considerably more. The catch is which rim: the West Rim with the Skywalk is two and a half hours away and is on tribal land rather than in the national park; the South Rim, the one from the photographs, is four and a half hours each way and makes for a very long day. If the canyon is the point of the trip, drive it and stay overnight rather than doing it as a coach day.
- 04
Go to Red Rock Canyon in the morning
Twenty minutes west of the Strip and a completely different Nevada: a thirteen-mile scenic loop through red sandstone escarpments with marked trails off it. Entry is $20 (about £16) per car and requires a timed-entry booking in the cooler half of the year. Go at opening. It is desert, there is no water on the trails, and the same afternoon heat that makes the Strip unpleasant is genuinely dangerous out here.
- 05
See a show, and buy the ticket the same day
Resident shows run from about £50 for the smaller magic and comedy rooms to £200 and up for the arena residencies. The Tix4Tonight booths and app sell unsold same-day seats at a substantial discount, which is how locals buy them. Cirque du Soleil has several permanent productions here and they are the reliable choice. Check whether the ticket price includes the service fee, because on many of them it does not.
After the flight
What it costs once you land
Everyday prices off the Strip, plus the two charges that are never in the advertised rate. Sales tax of about 8.4% goes on at the till and tipping runs 18 to 20% wherever there is service.
- Beer, casino bar £8 off-Strip bars are half; free drinks while playing are largely gone
- Dinner for two, mid-range £70 before tax and tip; a buffet is around £30 a head
- Hotel resort fee £36–£43 per night, compulsory, added at the desk on top of the room rate
- Self-parking at a Strip hotel £12–£28 per night, again separate; valet is more
- Airport to the Strip £20 rideshare; the pickup point at Harry Reid is a long walk from arrivals
- Breakfast off the Strip £10
Checked August 2026. Sources at the foot of this page.
Before you book
Practical, for a British passport
Entry rules are for a British Citizen passport holder and come from gov.uk, read on 2026-08-07. They change; check before you fly.
- Airport
- LAS, Harry Reid International, and unusually close — ten minutes to the south end of the Strip and twenty to the north. Rideshare pickup is in a dedicated garage that involves a substantial walk from baggage reclaim, which is worth knowing at the end of a ten-hour flight. Taxis queue outside the terminal and cost a few pounds more.
- Entry
- ESTA. USD 40 (about £32) — $10 charged on application, $30 more only if approved. Up to up to 90 days. Valid for the length of your planned stay. The fee rose from $21 to $40 on 30 September 2025, so any figure under thirty pounds you read elsewhere is out of date. An approved ESTA lasts two years or until the passport expires, whichever comes first — worth checking before you rebook, because one bought for a previous trip may still be live. Apply on esta.cbp.dhs.gov; the paid lookalike sites charge several times the fee for the same form. An ESTA is permission to fly, not permission to enter: the officer at the border decides that.
- Currency
- US dollar. Cards everywhere; keep small notes for tipping, which is constant here — a dollar or two per drink, per bag, per valet collection. Sales tax of around 8.4% is added at the till rather than shown on the shelf.
- Language
- English, with Spanish widely spoken. No barrier. The pharmacy names differ as everywhere in America: paracetamol is Tylenol or acetaminophen.
- Time zone
- Eight hours behind the UK. Nevada changes its clocks on different dates from Britain, so for a couple of weeks each spring and autumn the gap is seven hours instead.
- Plugs
- Type A and B, 120V. A British type-G plug does not fit and the voltage is half of home; chargers cope, hair appliances usually do not.
- Health
- The GHIC is worthless and American healthcare is the most expensive on earth, so comprehensive insurance is the most important purchase of the trip and pre-existing conditions must be declared. The specific local risk is heat: dehydration and heat exhaustion put visitors in hospital here every year, and it creeps up in dry air because you do not feel yourself sweating.
- Safety
- No FCDO warning against travel. The Strip is heavily policed and busy at all hours. The practical hazards are the heat, the pedestrian crossings — jaywalking on the Strip is both illegal and dangerous — and the drink, which is served in enormous measures and is cheaper than the water beside it.
A bed
Where to stay in Las Vegas
Almost everything is on or beside six kilometres of one boulevard, and where you sit on it decides how much walking you do. Filtered for the top-rated properties, each stretch returns a short list.
Las Vegas Strip
The central stretch, from the Bellagio fountains up past the Venetian, where the biggest resorts and most of the shows are and where you can walk to several others. The obvious first-visit base. Rates and resort fees are highest here, the pedestrian bridges make short journeys long, and the noise never entirely stops.
Stays in Las Vegas Strip Opens in a new tab QUIETER ENDSouth Strip
The southern stretch below the Luxor and Mandalay Bay, closest to the airport and generally cheaper for the same standard of room. Good for a short trip where you land late and leave early. It is a longer walk or a monorail ride to the middle of the Strip, and there is less within reach on foot.
Stays in The Strip Opens in a new tab OFF THE BOULEVARDElsewhere in Las Vegas
The off-Strip and downtown properties, where rates fall away sharply and several charge no resort fee at all — which on a week can be the difference of a few hundred pounds. Fremont Street downtown is the old Vegas and is a genuinely different experience. You will be taking a rideshare to the Strip every evening, so price that in.
Stays in Las Vegas Opens in a new tabEvery area pinned on one map, set to the dates of the fare above. Change them for your own trip and it reloads live availability.
Open the Las Vegas map Opens in a new tabGetting around
Walk less than you think you will. The Strip is six kilometres and the buildings are so large that crossing from one hotel's entrance to its neighbour's can take twenty minutes indoors. Pedestrian bridges force you up and over at the major junctions. The free trams between certain resort groups — Mandalay Bay to Excalibur, Bellagio to Aria, Mirage to Treasure Island — are worth learning, because they cut the worst of it.
The monorail runs behind the eastern resorts from the MGM Grand to the convention centre and Sahara, costs a few pounds a ride with day passes available, and does not stop at the airport. The Deuce bus runs the full length of the Strip and downtown around the clock and is cheap. Uber and Lyft are everywhere and are the default for anything after a show.
Hire a car only for the days you leave the city — Red Rock, the Hoover Dam, the canyon, or a fly-drive through the parks. A car sitting at a Strip hotel costs twelve to twenty-eight pounds a night to park on top of everything else, so hiring it for two days rather than seven is usually the right arithmetic.
Food and local tips
The buffet is the local institution and it is no longer cheap: the good ones run to about thirty pounds a head and the very good ones considerably more. What has replaced them as the value option is the food hall — Proper Eats at the Aria, Block 16 at the Cosmopolitan — where you can eat properly for a third of a restaurant bill. Off the Strip, the Chinatown strip along Spring Mountain Road is the best eating in the city by a distance and a fraction of the price.
Two habits save money. Buy water and breakfast at a CVS or Walgreens on the Strip rather than from the hotel, where a bottle costs several pounds. And remember the arithmetic that applies across America: 8.4% tax at the till and 18 to 20% expected as a tip, so a seventy-pound dinner becomes closer to ninety. Many restaurants now add the service charge automatically and leave a tip line as well.
Spring Mountain Road, after midnight
Las Vegas's Chinatown runs for three kilometres and much of it serves until three in the morning. A bowl of hand-pulled noodles is about £10, and it is where hospitality staff eat when their shift ends.
Ready for Las Vegas?
Pick your departure airport and see what the route costs today from each of the ten we track.
See the £525 fare Opens in a new tabSame band
Other long-haul destinations
Where the numbers came from
- Resort fee and parking charge ranges by hotel vegas4locals.com Opens in a new tab read 2026-08-08
- Hoover Dam tour and Grand Canyon day trip prices hooverdam-tours.co Opens in a new tab read 2026-08-08
- The ESTA fee increase and US entry rules cbp.gov Opens in a new tab read 2026-08-08
- Entry rules for a British Citizen passport gov.ukOpens in a new tab read 2026-08-07