Excalibur Hotel and casino, Las Vegas

Old hotels in Vegas are disappearing at an alarming rate, with giant billion dollar mega hotels being built on their imploded ruins. The Stardust went in March 2007, and the New Frontier is set to be imploded in early 2008. These hotels, though large, were old, and although imploding them was expensive, the total cost of imploding them paled into significance compared with the billions of dollars being poured into the construction of the new hotels that will replace them.

However, Las Vegas is one city that doesn’t stand still, and the new hotels are changing not just the skyline, but the nature of the visitors who are set to come to the strip in future years. Just as the older hotels such as the Stardust and New Frontier fell out of favour once the huge themed mega-resorts such as the Luxor were built, the worry is that these existing mega-resorts will also go into decline once the new super-luxurious mega-hotels are completed.