Orleans Hotel and Casino

Located across the 15 freeway from Las Vegas Boulevard on Tropicana Boulevard, the Orleans Hotel and Casino is really about the ultimate locals casino in the vicinity of the Strip.

Orleans Hotel and Casino

This is not your slick, trendy resort with the equally cool and trendy clientele. Instead, this is a laid back place with a lot of friendly locals. The kind of place where you can drink a domestic beer, have a blast in the poker room, then head on to the bowling alley to bowl a few strikes.

The Orleans is more of an old school kind of place, where you can walk out of your casino and head right to your car in the parking lot without having to navigate a huge garage or a serpentine shopping complex. It’s fun, easy, and relaxed. But it is also quite big. The casino, in fact, has a whopping 135,000 square feet of gaming space, along with 2,300 slots and a very large poker room.

There are also great pools here, not your swanky high end kind but absolutely huge, wonderful pools, one being full Olympic sized. They are great for swimming in, cooling off, and having a blast.

And speaking of cooling off, there is a 9,500 seat area at the Orleans that converts into an ice skating rink and which hosts everything from college basketball games to major concerts.

Then there is the Orleans bowling alley, all 70 magnificent lanes of it. And in case you didn’t know, 70 lanes makes for a very large bowling facility. It’s a great feature for a casino like this, and a great place to spend some time away from the tables.

The Orleans is about a mile away from the Strip, but there is a shuttle that runs to the center of the Strip every 30 minutes until around midnight, so it’s easy to get back and forth.

The Orleans is not for everyone, and if you are looking for they glitz and glamor of the newest high end Las Vegas resorts, then look a but further to the east on the Strip. But if you would like to have a great time with great people at the type of place that is harder and harder to find in Vegas these days, the Orleans is a great option at a great price.