I read a lot of bad reviews on here about the bay, and most of them were the month I stayed or before. I will say this: we really liked our room on the 23rd floor, the view of the pools and the airport was not amazing, but considering we checked in at 10 am and were not supposed to till 3pm we were happy with what we were offered. The airport was not very noisy at all.. at night it seemed like they cut flights off at a certain time. This resort is huge! there is so much to do here!! we found a really neat Irish pub in "The Shoppes" at Mandalay, also a Guinness store. We walked around lots of the other casinos and resorts and thought this was very close to the best in town. Even the taxi driver said that Mandalay was in the top three of places to stay obviously The Bellagio is the best, and Caesars or MGM are the next contenders. Thought it was really nice that you can text to check out to, that saved the really long checkout line! if you knew you could send a text to leave a place wouldn't you do it? the check in line was huge so we didn't want to face a long out line also. We flew in on United and used the app to do boarding passes, on the way out we were on American and had a nightmare trying to get their app to work on my phone the girl at the help desk was so nice she called them up for us and printed passes off for us! she was amazing if I remember her name I will email the hotel. I made the same call and got the runaround from American she managed to get through at same time and get us fixed up. We went up to the nightclub on the top floor one night for the amazing view over the strip that was well worth it. I will say one round of drinks cost us $25 though. There are about 6 or 8 pools at Mandalay including a lazy river and a wave pool, and some party pool with dj music most of the day. The lifts (elevators) all ran really fast between floors and there are plenty of them too. Our friends stayed at the Golden Nugget downtown and it was a lot different to the bay!!! more smoky and no where near as nice rooms, plus downtown can be very sketchy in places (don't veer off Freemont Street). I would definitely recommend the Mandalay bay to anyone and I would consider staying here again. P.S This was my first trip to Vegas so I learnt a lot! take a taxi from the airport not the shuttle its a little cheaper and a lot faster... especially as it doesn't stop at every hotel on the way!! I think our fare was around $12 it was $16 for both of us to use the shuttle bus!