The resort features of Casino Hotels are always designed to keep you gambling instead of actually enjoying the property. As a result, it’s been my experience that the pools and grounds of casino hotels are pretty lack lustre when compared to other beach or mountain properties. The Aria Sky Suites was no exception to this rule, despite a resort “fee”. Despite this, the room was well set up for private dining. It’s surprising that the best resort experiences are being cast away in your own private Sky Suite room.

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Review: The Aria Sky Suites Pool, Lounge and Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America.

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This post is about the Aria Sky Suite Resort Amenities. Please see here for a review of the Aria Sky Suites One Bedroom Penthouse at the Aria Sky Suites, Las Vegas.

Aria Sky Suites Lounge:

Guests of the Aria Sky Suites are offered access to a “secluded lounge with complimentary food and beverage amenities including a daily wine and cheese pairing”. Given this description, I was perhaps expecting something of a large space with a view on a high floor. Instead the lounge is actually part of the windowless lobby of the Aria Sky Suites. 

The atmosphere in the lounge certainly wasn’t one of exclusivity. All the arriving and departing passengers are paraded past the area. It is also occasionally used as the check in location for arriving guests. Since it’s a 2 minute walk from the elevator banks, heaps of people would stop by to load up their day bags with the free Fiji bottled water. There was such an exodus of product that the lounge attendant was apologetic to us that he was having trouble keeping the refrigerator stocked with cold water on our visit.

The food offerings weren’t very exciting on our visit through. It was sort of like the old and tired United Clubs where a sample of unappealing food was put out. We didn’t spend much time eating here.

The Pool Area:

Aria Sky Suites offers access to the other parts of the hotel. This meant a somewhat typical Las Vegas experience of the never ending party and groups celebrating everything under the sun. This can be both a positive and a negative depending on what your expectations are. The access back into Aria Sky Suites is quite discrete behind the marked door seen to the right on the green framed pictures.

The pool was jam packed on Saturday with hardly a spot to sit (without a cabana reservation). Aviation fans would have the opportunity to witness several, Eurocopter P135’s spinning across the pool overhead since the pool is on the helicopter sightseeing route. There was also lots of DJ Music Spilling over from Liquid Lounge overtop of the regular pop music soundtrack at the pool. It wasn’t a super serene experience but it was most certainly an entertaining one.

As with many large scale properties, the pool is a pretty dense location and unless you’re renting a cabana, you’re likely to share space shoulder to shoulder with many other guests.

There were some views of the large skyscraper of the Aria property from the pool. The property is certainly an imposing structure, much like all other Las Vegas casinos.

Food and Beverage: Room Service

One of the best features of the Aria Sky Suites was the dining room located in the suite itself. The room service was excellent, featuring a 24 hour menu with no annoying 11 AM cut off time for breakfast ordering. I would have guessed that room service orders would have been problematic for a hotel with 4,004 hotel rooms. Despite this, our order was correctly delivered and filled within 30 minutes of calling on all three days. We had breakfast in the suite every morning and enjoyed the unique strip view along with Wall Street Journal delivered newspapers. 

I can’t quite make out the demographics of the people that the Aria Sky Suites directly target. It’s clear there is a stronger Asian influence in Las Vegas more than ever before. There were Asian (Mandarin Newspapers in the lobby), mandarin on the room service menu and the usual feature of Congee and other Asian dishes to dine on. There are probably a small percentage that are staying here on comps provided by the casino. In actuality, if those in the lounge are any guest representation, it’s a mix of Asian, late twenties with piercings, shorts and flip flops, and other couples late thirty to early forties couples gouging the free water and drinks from the fridge to take aware to their rooms. 

All in all: does the Aria Sky Suites deliver? 

Yes and no. The best features include the arrival service. It can be a great value add to arrive at McCarran and be picked up in a nice car. The immediate front desk check in was also a nice alternative than joining a queue on the regular side that always seems to be a mile long (no matter which Las Vegas Strip hotel you stay in). The added amenities of the lounge, although not as chic as advertised, was a nice place to stop for a quick drink on the way out onto the town. Despite this, we still went to CVS Pharmacy for extra drinks for the room fridge. The room was also very nicely appointed and configured. Room service, whenever you want it, with a strip view is absolutely fabulous. It was also nice to use the discrete taxi rank at the North Entrance with line priority thanks to the Aria Sky Suites branded room cards. 

The downside of the Sky Suites are that, once you are beyond the pampering of all the Sky Suites, you are still in Las Vegas- the city of debauchery. Unlike riding First Class on an international airline carrier, where you are pretty much totally walled off from the rest of the world through the travel experience suites and lounges (and can stay that way on arrival through escorts and services), at the Aria Sky Suites if you want to go gambling, dine out or head to the pool, you get to head though the party of the masses and crowds of people that are staying there. This isn’t necessarily a negative experience. However, my observations are that the Sky Suites offered a different co-mingling experience in that peace and serenity was available at your room and behind the walled areas of the Sky Suites property, and the regular Las Vegas experience was available just beyond those guarded doors to the casino floor.

We would likely be return guests to the Sky Suites and enjoyed our experience there.

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Do you think it’s worth staying at the Aria Sky Suites instead of in the regular Aria hotel?

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