Movie makers rely on creating illusion. Any storyteller requires their audience to enter into the spirit of things, to willingly suspend their disbelief. A willing suspension of disbelief is necessary in Las Vegas at almost every street crossing as one leaves Paris to enter Caesars Palace to go shopping in the Forum, or as one leaves Arthurian legends at the Excalibur to walk to Mandalay

You can ride a Coney Island roller coaster in New York, or catch a gondola in Venice. “Is it really like Venice?” asked one woman, walking around the Venetian, “No” replied her companion, “this is much cleaner”. New York, Venice, Mandalay, Monte Carlo, all are part of a world of hotel developments strong on entertainment, eating and above all, selling dreams along a four mile stretch of highway, officially Las Vegas Boulevard South, unofficially ‘the Strip’.

What sets the Strip apart and makes it worthy of its own story (for as you will know Reviews are generally only of Hotels, not locations) is that it is a design triumph. Kitsch it may be, but with 14 of the 15 largest hotels in the world here, and thematic design that allows for gondola rides or a pizza in a Venetian square under a painted sky from which (I am assured) it does occasionally rain this is a booming theatrical hotel environment.

It is the scale of Las Vegas hotels that allows them to create alternative realities convincingly, and which also allows the commercial exploitation of those realties. We are not looking here at a downmarket environment either, for there are restaurants by named chefs, including a number with one or more Michelin stars. It is not just the number of rooms that are big. There is the world’s largest chocolate fountain, twenty seven feet high with 5 tons of hot chocolate circulating through it. The concepts are big, bold and design led. If ever an hotelier wanted a justification of how design can lead to money being made then they should come to Las Vegas.