One Las Vegas Night, Hour by Hour: A Plan for the Evening

One night here is enough if you spend it in the right order, and the order is not obvious, because the two districts are five miles apart and the best free shows run to timetables that do not line up. This is the plan that works, hour by hour, with the reasons attached.

What time does the evening actually start?

Whenever the sun goes down, which moves by three and a half hours across the year. In the first week of December sunset is about 4:26pm; at the end of June it is about 8:03pm. Check your date before you plan anything else, because in winter you have an eight-hour evening and in summer you have four.

Everything below assumes an autumn or spring evening with sunset around 6pm to 7pm. In midsummer, shift the whole thing an hour and a half later and drop the first item. In midwinter you can start it at half past four.

Before you start: eat

This is the most-ignored piece of advice about a Las Vegas evening and the one that wrecks the most nights. Almost nothing listed here includes food, the resort restaurants fill from seven, and a queue at nine with a hungry party is how a good plan ends. Eat at six, or accept that you are eating at eleven.

The exception is the dinner-and-flight package, which builds a three-course meal at the Eiffel Tower Restaurant into the booking with transfers between all three legs. If that appeals, it replaces the first two hours of this plan entirely.

7:00pm — the middle of the Strip, on foot

Start at the Bellagio and walk north. The Conservatory is open around the clock, takes ten minutes and is free; the seasonal display is genuinely worth the detour. From there the walk to the Venetian takes twenty-five minutes on wide, lit, busy pavement, past the Cosmopolitan, Caesars Palace, the LINQ Promenade and Sphere.

This is the best walk in the city and it costs nothing. It is also where you learn the scale: two resorts that look adjacent are twenty minutes apart, which is the fact that ruins most first itineraries.

8:00pm — the first fifteen-minute fountain show

The Fountains of Bellagio run every 30 minutes through the afternoon and switch to every 15 minutes at 8pm, continuing until midnight. Be back at the lake for one. Stand on the Bellagio's own lakeside walk rather than across the boulevard: from the far pavement you lose the sound, and the sound is half of it.

High wind cancels a show. If one is skipped, wait fifteen minutes rather than assuming the evening is off.

8:30pm — going north, and how

Downtown is about five miles from here and there is no walk. Three options, in order of cost:

• The Deuce. Runs Las Vegas Boulevard 24 hours a day, about every 15 minutes. A 24-hour pass is $8 and covers the return leg too. Allow 35 to 45 minutes each way in evening traffic.
• Rideshare. Faster, and about twenty minutes. The catch is the pick-up point: the big resorts route it into a parking structure several minutes from where you are standing.
• A night tour. The open-top bus does the leg as part of a two-hour loop that also covers the Strip, which for $59 is less than a taxi one way.

9:15pm — a full show under the Fremont canopy

The Fremont Street Experience runs its Viva Vision light shows at the top of every hour from 6pm to 2am, six to eight minutes each. Arrive ten minutes before the hour and stand in the middle of the mall rather than at either end: the canopy is 1,375 feet long and 90 feet up, and you want it overhead rather than in front of you.

Three stages under the canopy run live music between shows and the casinos on either side are the old ones. If SlotZilla appeals, the zip lines launch from 77 and 114 feet, and they run late.

Is the Neon Museum worth adding?

Yes, if you are downtown before ten and interested in how any of this came to look the way it does. It is a mile north of Fremont Street, evening admission is $35 for an adult on the museum's own published rate, and hours are 6pm to 11pm with last admission at 10pm, which is the constraint.

Set expectations properly: the Neon Museum shows rescued signs in an outdoor yard with light and sound projected across them. Not every sign is lit. It is a curated collection rather than a field of burning neon, and people who go expecting the latter come away disappointed.

10:30pm — back south, and the late fountains

Come back down the boulevard. The 15-minute fountain cycle runs until midnight and the crowds have thinned considerably by eleven, which makes the late shows better than the early ones. Sphere's exterior is at its best now too, and it reads better from three blocks back than from underneath.

If you have energy left, this is when the club crawls are running and when the queues at the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign move fastest.

What if you only have three hours?

Stay on the Strip and cut downtown entirely. The Conservatory, the walk to the Venetian, two fountain shows and a look at Sphere fills three hours comfortably and costs nothing. Downtown is the leg that needs a plan, and half an evening is not enough to do it justice.

The other three-hour answer is a single tour. A two-hour open-top bus covers both districts and hands the whole geography to you at once, which is a different and equally good use of a short night.

The evening, in one table

Show times as published by each venue; the Deuce fare is the Regional Transportation Commission's.

Let a tour do the driving

Where a booking replaces a leg of this

Three places, and it is worth being specific.

The trip north and back is the obvious one: an open-top bus does it as part of a loop that also covers the Strip, for less than a return taxi. A guided van does the same ground with eight timed stops and collects you from your hotel, which turns the whole plan into one booking. And a helicopter flight replaces the walking entirely for twelve minutes, which is a different evening rather than a cheaper one.

What no booking replaces is the fountains and the canopy. Those are free, they run every night, and every itinerary here is arranged around them. The tour options page sets out which format covers which leg, and everything is listed on Las Vegas lights night tour.

Frequently asked questions

Build the evening around the free shows and book only the legs you would rather not do yourself. Every departure is listed on Las Vegas Night Tours.