Smelly Venetian

I like nearly everything about the Venetian poker room. (See http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2007/08/another-poker-dump.html.) It's quiet, smoke-free, comfortable, profitable, always action going day or night, standard comp system, better-than-average dealers.

The thing I most dislike about playing there is a complaint that I have for no other poker room in town: the smell. Not the stink, mind you, as I would say if it were cigarette smoke or body odor or an open sewer or something. It's the smell that they add to the ventilation system. It's a sickly sweet lavendar/vanilla mix of some sort. It's so heavy that it is nearly assaultive. If I put in a long session, I will definitely be able to smell "Venetian" coming from the discarded clothes in my laundry basket for the rest of the week.

Tonight I got another tangible example of how thickly they use this odorant. I was there with out-of-town family for less than an hour--just long enough to go to the poker room to pick up a comp ticket, then go to a restaurant for dessert. While at the comp desk, I snatched a Kleenex (yeah, I know the manufacturer hates having the brand name used as a generic term; tough cookies, I'm doing it anyway) from the dispenser, because the slight chill outside tonight had made my nose run a bit. I stuck it in my shirt pocket.

Fast forward. It's now six hours later. I'm sitting at home at my computer doing some other work. I keep having the sense that I'm smelling the Venetian. It finally dawns on me that it's that damn Kleenex. I pull it out of my pocket, and, sure enough, that's what is doing it.

If you are putting so much perfume into the air that six hours later a Kleenex taken from the hotel still reeks of it, well, you're seriously overdoing it. It's really quite ghastly.

To the best of my knowledge, no other casino in Vegas feels compelled to add perfume to their air. At least if they do, it's at such a low level that I don't notice it, which means that I don't care.

Admittedly, I've griped about this to other players and even one Venetian dealer, and haven't yet found anybody who was bothered by it enough to count it as a strike against the place. So maybe it's just me. Maybe I have genetically defective olfaction that is hypersensitive for the exact ingredients the Venetian infuses. But boy do I wish they would drop its intensity about six notches on the Richter Smelly Scale.

Can't they just pump in tons of extra oxygen, like every other casino?*

(Above: The new chips celebrating the opening of the Venetian's sister property, the Palazzo. For lots of nice photos of the place, see http://www.vegasrex.com/2007/12/31/the-palazzo-sort-of-opens/.)


*Please don't write to tell me that that's just an urban legend. I know it already. It was a joke, OK?