Category: General

We are happy to announce The New Tropicana Las Vegas as our new Strip shuttle drop-off location beginning Friday, Aug. 1. It is an ideal drop-off point, situated just three miles from Tahiti Village on the south end of the Strip in the heart of the action. What’s more, the New Tropicana Las Vegas is making it worth your while to stay and play. Just join the Trop Plus Players Club and your first $200 is on the house! Click on the link for details. The New Tropicana Las Vegas was previously our New Year’s Eve drop-off point, and we are delighted we could enter into a permanent partnership.

The recent arrival of two new shuttles means you’ll be riding in extra comfort on your next visit. Each new bus is compliant with federal disability laws, seats 38 passengers (32 when modified for wheelchairs) and has a rooftop-mounted air conditioning system that is more than a match for the Las Vegas heat.

“The new shuttles get cooler faster and stay cooler longer,” said Robert Martinez, Tahiti Village director of transportation services.

Unlike the side-mounted air conditioning system on the older buses, the rooftop system does not pull in ground heat from the asphalt, which can reach 200 degrees. Instead, it draws in air from the top.

“When running at optimal capacity,” Robert explained, “it cools the bus much faster than the side-mounted AC system.”

The system is comprised of three fan condensers for a total of nine fans and three AC compressors.

“It’s a much more heavy duty unit,” he said.

At 36 feet, the new shuttles are anywhere from two to four feet longer than their predecessors, contain more seats and have a backup camera with proximity censors.

The arrival of a third new bus, expected in June, will raise to five the number of shuttles in our fleet that are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The expected acquisition of another ADA shuttle by the end of the year means six of our seven buses will be compliant. “The goal is to have all of our buses be ADA compliant,” Robert said.

New to all our shuttles are fancy route cards designed by an actual graphic artist. They are placed in sign holders in the side window and denote the route number and destination, such as Red Rock Canyon or the Fremont Street Experience.

Now you’ll never board one of our buses thinking you’re going to the grocery store and wind up at a casino.

With Las Vegas temperatures soaring into the 70s and owners flocking to the beach pool like competitive eaters to an all-you-can-eat buffet, we thought, `Ah, what the heck.  Let’s open the outdoor bar.’ So that’s what we did. Opened the poolside tiki bar for the summer. In March. As usual, we have a great selection of beer, spirits and slushy margarita type thingies for you to enjoy while you’re defrosting in the sunshine and contemplating your next move. Will it be a relaxing trip down the Lazy River? A soothing dip in the adult hot tub? Or what about another cold one as you soak up the rays and enjoy the scenery? You have a lot of choices, and you’ll have even more with the scheduled opening this summer of our new restaurant and bar with seating overlooking the pool. It’s shaping up to be a great season in the sun here at Tahiti Village, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we will bringing it to you. See you soon!

In the midst of our busy home and work lives, it’s easy to forget to go on vacation. Wouldn’t it be helpful if you had someone to remind you? Now you do! We formed AllSET (Allotment Services Entitlement Team) for just that purpose. Now if you forget to use your vacation time, we have a dedicated team to remember for you. Our AllSET agents are here to help you make the most of your purchase. So if you get a phone call someday from someone saying she’s from AllSET, it’s not a telemarketer. It’s just Venus, Lei or Allison calling to remind you of your entitlement usage. Then you’re AllSET!

The main pool is closing Monday, Jan. 13, for a major refurbishment project and will reopen Friday, Feb. 7. We are replastering and retiling the pool, stripping and resealing the concrete decks, replacing the lifeguard towel hut and rethatching the palapas. The spa off the main pool will also close for renovations at the same time. The Lazy River and adult spa will be open for you to enjoy during the closure. When the main pool and spa reopen in February, we will turn our attention to the Lazy River. It will close from Feb. 24-27 for minor repairs. This capital improvement project will ensure your continued enjoyment of our aquatic attractions and exemplifies your maintenance fees hard at work. We thank you for your understanding during these necessary closures.

Due to the Strip closure for New Year’s Eve, our normal shuttle drop off locations at New York-New York and The Mirage have changed. We are now dropping off at Hooters Casino, just east of the Tropicana Hotel on Tropicana Avenue and the Strip. Buses are leaving Tahiti Village at the top and bottom of the hour until 2 a.m. We will resume our normal schedule on Jan. 1, 2014. Happy New Year!

Are you among those people for whom the end of the year signals a need to reflexively pause and ruminate on the previous 364 days? We are too, despite warnings from leading health professionals about the dangers of compulsive pausing and ruminating.

We’d kick the habit if we we could, but like kind old ladies who take in stray cats and those poor folks who can’t part with 20-year-old McDonald’s wrappers, we just can’t help ourselves. We can’t stop remembering! There are simply too many great things to relive from the year that was here at Tahiti Village. Besides, we couldn’t even if we wanted to. This morning when we opened our email we found the following message:

“Do a blog post on everything that happened here in 2013.”  

Boss tells you to retrieve and share data from your stored bank of memories, you do it. In previous years the only question would be in which direction we would remember: from December backwards to January or January forward to December. The downside to both was the delusion that your memory had more gigabytes than it actually did. In reality it just couldn’t be trusted to recall every odd factoid from March or exciting new vending machine addition (Pepe’s Pork Rinds, anyone?) from June. That’s why this year we wrote it all down.

So here for your edification and enjoyment, without further delay and in no particular order, is a handy-dandy summary of events and occurrences (plus one or two statistical bonbons) from 2013. Let the bullet points fly!

• In late November we doubled our social media presence with the launch of the Tahiti Village Facebook page. If you haven’t already, please visit our site and Like us. And don’t forget, we’re also on Twitter. Be sure to Follow us and receive information on your home resort 140 characters at a time.

• It’s one thing to say our aquatic attractions and resort activities are popular. It’s another to support the claim with raw statistics. In 2013 we actually took a head count and came up with the following set of  numbers: Nearly 20,000 people (19,689 to be exact) participated in a property-planned activity, 225,909 swam in the main pool and 123,336 floated around the Lazy River. The more the merrier indeed.

• Towers 1 and 2 were the objects of several improvement projects during the year. Units received new carpet, 42-inch HDTVs, armoires and new stackable washer-dryers, which replaced the all-in-ones. Finally, dryers that dry!

• Did you know the Tahiti Village housekeeping department cleaned and released 3,804 rooms ahead of schedule? Talk about elbow grease.

• Our annual Easter egg hunt drew a large contingent of kids and their parents to the Island Courtyard for a day of fun and games. How many attended? We’re not eggxactly sure.

• Lu-Wow! Our 13 weekly summer luaus drew a total of 3,362 attendees, or roughly 258 per luau. That’s a lot of kalua pork!

• And speaking of the luau, we changed its traditional day and location from Saturday poolside to Sunday inside the new Island Courtyard. We made the switch to give the most people the best opportunity to attend.

• We won the TripAdvisor Award of Excellence for a second straight year. Yay!

• We earned another Interval International Premier Award. Yay!

• We maintained our standing as an RCI Gold Crown Resort property. Yay!

• In response to numerous requests, we added a Saturday morning grocery run to accommodate owners arriving after the last supermarket shuttle Friday morning. Who knows what’s in store next.

• Lots of people went lots of places on our shuttle busses this past year. We transported 8,854 to the Fremont Street Experience, 5,253 to the grocery store, 2,892 to Red Rock Canyon and 1,768 to Town Square.

• Summer Saturdays got a lot livelier with the debut of our pool party hosted by DJ Brit Lee. In addition to spinning all the hits, Lee presided over poolside activities such as the hula hoop contest, water volleyball tournament and not-for-money bingo. You won’t believe how much fun you can have on a Saturday afternoon in Vegas.

• In June we installed motorized chair lifts next to each body of water on property. They give our owners and guests with disabilities equal access to the pool, Lazy River and hot tubs. They are permanently affixed to the deck at the edge of each aquatic attraction.

• Two of our favorite guests, NHRA drag racer Terry McMillen (he of the fast car) and psychic Gary Spivey (he of the big hair), paid their annual visits to Tahiti Village. Will Gary be here in 2014? Only he knows for sure.

• In the fall movie nights went year-round when we began screening films 6 p.m. Saturdays in Tower 5. They will continue in that location until summer, when we resume our Wednesday Dive-In Movie night at the main pool and Saturday night movie at the Island Courtyard.

• A costumed crowd attended our first Oktoberfeast and Festival to celebrate the Halloween season. Games, delicious food truck offerings, and costume and pumpkin pie eating contests awaited attendees inside the Island Courtyard.    

• Here’s what we wrote this past summer in our newsletter about the arrival of new vending machines: We are happy to announce our new partnership with First Class Vending. In our quest to give you the best of everything, we felt an affiliation with a world-renowned snack dispenser was only fitting. The company consistently replenishes inventory with all your favorites, but is also on the cutting edge of product delivery. Each First Class Vending machine is equipped with infrared technology that detects whether the vended product has dropped. How many times have you stuck money in a vending machine, punched the button and then watched in horror as your Funyuns hung teasingly by a bag edge over the drop zone? Those days are over. You can find our new vending machines, 40 in all, on each floor except the 10^th in Tower 5. 

And with that we come to the end of our reminiscence on the year 2013. We’re all out of bullet points, and we’re ready to take a break until January 1^st, when we’ll begin our survey of all the 2014 events, occurrences and oddities we will look back on this time next year. We wish you all a great new year and look forward to seeing you soon.