Yield management is the technical term for how Las Vegas adjusts hotel room rates like a faucet adjusts water. If you want a room on New Year's Eve, you could easily pay 300% more than you would for the same room on the slowest night of the year. Rooms on the Strip don't have a fixed price.  And these days, that is all to the advantage for the bargain-hunting consumer.

The economy is partly the reason for the potential bargains in Strip room rates. But adding to the perfect storm, I think, is the fact that resort companies for the past few years have been planning more for the continued growth of the high end of the market than building for the traditional bread-and-butter customers who come to Vegas for a cheap vacation. But those customers may be the beneficiaries of rooms meant for a different (wealthier) segment of the market altogether.  I think there soon will be some truly amazing opportunities for tourists to enjoy the sort of luxury rooms rarely mentioned in the same sentence with words such as "bargain" or even "affordable."

Here is how it works. The resorts need to fill their rooms 365 days a year in hopes of making money on your going to their shows, shopping, dining and gambling.  As places like the New Frontier and Stardust, which offered affordable rooms, have closed, the new resorts and condo/hotels such as the recently opened Venetian's Palazzo, Palm's Place and Trump, as well as the next wave of properties set to open -- including Wynn's Encore, MGM's six-tower CityCenter and Cosmopolitan -- aren't targeted to bargain shoppers. But after these rooms come on line, yield management means the rooms must be filled, as Sartre and Malcolm X might say, by any rate necessary.

Earlier this month, Anthony Curtis of LasVegasAdvisor.com told the L.A. Times: "I'm predicting the room rates are going to be the lowest in six or seven years" this summer. But for the bargain shopper, the future looks even brighter. High-end rooms may be had for cut-rate costs probably never considered possible when ground was broken on them.

(Photo by Sarah Gerke)