About Eric and this guide

I'm Eric, and I write this guide. It covers Las Vegas and the trips that start from it: the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Antelope Canyon, Valley of Fire, Red Rock, Zion, and the helicopter flights over all of them. The trips are where most of the money goes, and where a single wrong fact costs the most.

Most of the bad advice I see about these trips is one fact out of date. A tour sold as "the Grand Canyon" that goes to the Hualapai Reservation's Grand Canyon West, where a national park pass is worth nothing. A drive time copied from another site. A ticket price from three seasons ago. I try to get those facts right and say plainly when something is still unannounced.

How I check things

Prices, hours and rules come from whoever sets them: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Hualapai Tribe's own Grand Canyon West site, Nevada State Parks, the Navajo Nation parks department, and each tour operator's listing. Drive times are measured with a routing engine from one fixed point, Las Vegas Boulevard at Flamingo Road in the middle of the Strip, so every page uses the same starting line. Each page says when its facts were checked.

I don't write that I took a tour or stood at a viewpoint unless it happened, and when a page does say so, it gives the date. Opinions on this site are labeled as opinions, with the fact they rest on next to them.

How tours get ranked

Star ratings on booking sites bunch up near the top: of the 689 Las Vegas tours in the GetYourGuide data behind this site, 268 have at least 15 reviews, and nearly three in four of those rate 4.5 or higher. Meanwhile 147 listings are rated a perfect 5.0, and 131 of those have fewer than ten reviews. Sorting by stars puts those at the top. Instead, every tour gets a score that blends its rating with a deliberately low starting value, and the tour's own rating only outweighs that starting value once it passes 50 reviews. A tour climbs by collecting good reviews, not by getting lucky early. Anything I present as a recommendation also needs at least 15 reviews.

The ratings, review counts and prices you see come from GetYourGuide and change often. The checkout page always has the current price.

How the site makes money

Booking links go to GetYourGuide for tours and Expedia for hotels. If you book through one, the site earns a commission and you pay the same price you would anyway. That commission is the only income. There are no sponsored posts or paid placements, and no operator can buy a spot in a list. When the right answer is something those partners don't sell, like a tour run by a government agency, I say so and link the official source directly.

Vegas Visitor Guide is published by Pluripotent, LLC.

Corrections

If something here is wrong or out of date, email [email protected] or use the contact page. Corrections get fixed first, ahead of anything new.