Spend a few days at the Lake Las Vegas Hilton. Some impressions:

- there is a $29 resort fee that magically appears on your bill, but front desk doesn't bother to mention it at checkin and provides no information what benefits are covered by it. No info in room either.

- Diamonds and Gold get free continental buffet breakfast. While the quality is quite decent, it's basically just oatmeal, fruits, yogurt and pastries. You can pay $10 per person surcharge for hot items (think potatoes, meat, scrambled eggs). After a week at a European Hilton earlier this month this was quite disappointing.

- hallways near our room smelled like marijuana and one night we had cigarette smoke coming into the bathroom through the vent (made me wonder about smoke from a fire getting distributed through the ventilation system; note to self: pack duct tape)

- the room (no upgrade, as far as I could tell, even though hotel appeared fairly empty) was in good shape. Bathroom had shower and tub. Could use some more power outlets. One nightstand had two 110V + 2 USB, but the other one had none, and we had to crawl under the desk to plug in items.

- the Lake Las Vegas Village around the hotel is basically dead. Other than a couple of restaurants, a real estate office, and a chocolate store every single store front is for rent. The casino, of course, has been closed for many years.