OYO Las Vegas

Information

Full Review

What a long, strange trip this place has had. The building originally opened in 1973 as a Howard Johnson’s and over the years has operated under no fewer than nine different names including the Paradise, the 20th Century, the Treasury, the Pacifica, the Polynesian, the San Remo, and, most recently, Hooters.

The hotel was purchased in September of 2019 by Oyo, a chain that if you haven’t heard of yet, will be hearing a lot more in the future. Based in India, Oyo is currently the third largest hotel chain in the world (based on room count) behind only Marriott and Hilton, with over 850,000 rooms in more than 800 cities around the globe. Just over 100 of those hotels are in the US and they have very aggressive expansion plans so this will become a much more common name to domestic travelers.

Most of their properties are simple and inexpensive. If you’d prefer to use the word cheap, you may and I probably wouldn’t argue with you. Furnishings are plain, amenities are few, and onsite facilities are usually limited to a pool, maybe. The bulk of the Oyo hotels in the US probably fall somewhere in the same category where you’d Red Roof Inn or Motel 6.

Having said that, Vegas will be one of their flagship properties and the only one with a casino and Hooters restaurants (yes, that’s staying). They are investing about $20 million into revamping the property, which isn’t much for a hotel that has over 600 rooms. In other words, don’t expect a lot of swanky touches when the rebranding is done.

Between now and then, you’ll be rolling the proverbial dice by staying here and should probably base it solely on your budget. If you can afford something else, it’s probably worth the extra few bucks but if you can find a very cheap room here and don’t care about things like luxury, then this might work for you. The rooms in the Hooters era were small (about 350 square feet) and fairly plain, and the quality was usually solidly middle tier, so any updates will be welcome. We’ll see what, if anything, they do to the rooms under the new management and go from there.

FYI – when you see those cheap prices, beware the $26 per night resort fee that gets added on top.