Not if you look at the guests of the Cosmopolitan’s Boulevard Penthouses in Las Vegas.
The penthouses are the gambler’s city most famous rooms. To enter them you either have to be someone who plays for millions in the hotel’s casino – or cater for them.
And wcater for those high-roller guests may not only introduce you to three-digit tips but also to very, very strange people that are guests there.
At least those guests don’t drink (often), because they want to keep a cool head. If you look at their behavior though you might think that would not make a big difference.
One repeat guest prefers the suite with a chinchilla-fur hammock; he’s been known to splay himself across it naked, waiting for a butler to find him. Another, a well-known basketball player, enjoys having sex on the morning of his departure while the butlers fastidiously pack up his luggage. And one of the casino’s oldest guests—also one of the only high-rolling women—has garnered a colorful reputation for discarding fur coats (“I’m bored of them!”), and throwing fists in the gaming salon when her luck is waning. Her other favorite pastime: asking the butlers to dress up in pajamas, crawl into bed next to her, and read her bedtime stories.
Some of those guests have a per-hour bet rate equivalent to a small country’s GPD and wins and (more often) losses of a stay are counted in millions of dollars.
Gamblers are prone to superstition, and the high rollers to highly individual superstition. Staff has learned to not take away anything from gambling tables – even tobacco ashes – if they didn’t made damn sure there was no “lucky item” in what non-gambling people would consider trash. And be prepared for an interesting array of individual behavior.
One notorious guest, for instance, requests glass after glass of scotch on the rocks while he’s on the gaming floor—not for drinking, but to moisten a tiny brown “medicine bag” that hangs from his neck.
Does the medicine bag works better when it is cooled, or why the ice? And if yes, why not put it into a refrigerator? Ordering one would be considered quite boring by this casino’s standards.
Of course, even high rollers hate to lose, so when they have lost in the casino, they might try to “get even” with the hotel by leaving with more stuff than they came.
Several have brought extra suitcases and asked the butlers to fill them with items from their suite—think coffee table books, unopened alcohol, and decorative Hermès knickknacks.
Do you gamble?