I live on the East Coast but have been a Hall of Fame player at the Palms since they created the tier. Am also a 7 Stars player since that program began. But I have disliked Harrahs/Caesars and the way they run their business and treat VP players for several years, but at the same time loved almost everything about the Palms except my extreme lack of success historically there. Sad to say but this weekend confirmed to me that those days appear over. The Palms seems headed the way of CZR.
I visit LV about 9-10 times a year and over the past year all of those visits went to non-Palms properties. The caliber of Palms offers had dropped tremendously from getting $600-$1400 in free play per visit to $50-$100 and no first tier-type events like before. No doubt a good deal of that marketing drop-off is related to my own significant drop in average daily coin-in at the Palms - but not to that degree.
Besides Sam's Town and occasionally at the Gold Coast, I don't play at most of the Locals casinos in town. But the caliber of stuff you can "earn" in the monthly Palms "giveaways" is so pathetically cheap I rarely bother even redeeming for it. I don't want to have to create space or add weight to my luggage to carry back the kind of garbage they give away. I think if you added up the real cost to the Palms of the merchandise they are giving away in their current $170,000+ giveway it might top $170 but not by much.
Even though I haven't been staying there recently until this past weekend, I always play there - because I like the ambience, the familiarity of the place, the restaurants, theater, and the fact that I still have several thousand dollars of comps in their Original Points system that I want to keep alive. But the VP offerings just keep getting less compelling. As mentioned in other posts, NSUD appears to be MIA at least in the hi-limit area, they've moved most single-play VP in that area to multi-play, gotten rid of most of the $25 level (with $100 being gone for at least a year. BP is what I'll still play in that room.
The 100%+ games in the rest of the casino are all gone (or seem to be - correct me if I'm wrong) Specialty VP like Multistrike have lousy paytables - even AC has better ones. They've even changed the kiosks where locals can redeem promo offers and anyone can access their "Original Points" which the old screens prominently promised "would never expire."
The new kiosk system was working very slowly this weekend. Granted the old system had a whopper of a bug for a long time - you could swipe your card and/or plug in a random PIN and up would pop the account of some random player. But I much preferred its speed of access. Maybe the new system represents a fix for that security problem.
As for the rooms, I noticed a downgrade in the toiletries which is something the Palms used to be great with. Real cheap stuff now. Also, beginning at 6am I was only in my hotel room w/ the Do Not Disturb sign on in the Fantasy Tower for about 45 minutes between noon and 2pm Saturday. Yet when I returned at 7pm my room had been cleaned and the "Please clean" sign had been on all the rest of that time. Makes me wonder about the housekeeping staffing.
Even reading the details of the promotion I was there on (Blackjack tournament) discouraged me from actually participating when I had juicy live poker tournaments I could participate in elsewhere. They only paid 4 places and it looked like you'd have to survive something like 6-7 consecutive matches on Saturday and Sunday to get into the money. Not worth it I decided.
I really am sad to see the Palms in such decline (at least for VP players). My favorite LV casino for a long time. If they get rid of or downgrade that 6 machine block of quarter 9/6 JOB Ten Play machines that's been sitting near Security and the Pearl for such a long time, I probably will give up playing there for good.
