I’ve done between five and ten hotel or hotel/casino shops for RBG, not in Las Vegas.
This will be a long comment, but I’m trying to cover it all.
The one-night hotel (only) shops have you stay at the designated hotel (nice upscale four-star—not five—hotel). They require a lot of writing, primarily about meals, but also about the state of the service and maintenance. The meals have great reimbursements if you do the shop alone, not bad if you’re with a guest. Each meal is like doing an individual restaurant shop for the MSC. One small problem is you may have eat more often than you normally would: e.g. formal restaurant, casual, food court, buffet, counter service (choose three) PLUS room service and pool bar. You know approximately how much goes into a restaurant shop.
You normally have to get a spa service and report on it. This is much easier than the restaurant reports. It’s reimbursed up to $300. That’s nice if you want a massage or other treatment.
The check-in and -out process requires reports. Not too tough, but detailed.
The other service and maintenance checks are pretty easy but take an hour or two total.
The pay is usually $125 or $135 plus a $25 bonus for submitting on time. There’s generally no ability to wait for additional bonuses because these are usually snapped up.
The reports take a total of twelve to fifteen hours, in my experience. I try to do as many as possible while at the hotel. The pay would not be worth it if that was the sole reason you were doing the shop. I did one recently because I wanted to do things in the area before and after the hotel stay. That made it worthwhile to me.
Now, the casino hotel shops:
Same nice hotel group, but these are the ones with casinos. The MSC offers one- and two-night shops. I’ve done both. The pay for one night is usually $125 or $135 plus a $35 bonus for submitting within 24 hours. For the one-night, you stay at a cheaper hotel nearby (not “cheap”— they reimburse for a three-star) and do the three restaurant reviews plus a pool bar and a drink at a casino bar. Once again, typical restaurant reports. You do the spa.
There are no reports about the hotel except very short ones.
Aside from the restaurants, the bill of the reports are about gambling. You have to have interactions in the slot machine areas and the table games in each of three shifts. Each requires a report about a cocktail server. The hardest part of these is finding a server. You also report about a slot attendant for each shift. You do have to gamble on the slots.
For the table games, you again report about the cocktail servers, and again they can be hard to find. You also do a report on each dealer and each pit boss. Not long reports, but you can see there are a lot of them. A problem with table games is keeping to the allowed gambling budget of $500. There are three slot interactions and three table games, plus poker room and bingo (although the ones I’ve done haven’t had bingo). Table game minimums can be a problem (usually $25 at night per deal and maybe $15 during the day). You can drag out slot play for a long time with $10-20 by taking your time between plays. Poker generally is hard to do without s $100 or so buy-in.
The big advantage to these shops is that you can keep your winnings up to $500 and your losses are completely covered up to that $500 budget. If you're a good gambler you may come out with much better pay for the shop with no chance of loss. Unfortunately, I've never won on one of these trips, partly because it's hard to concentrate on the gambling.
The total for these reports is about ten to twelve hours, for me at least. It’s hard to do many of them while onsite because there are so many interactions to complete.
The two-night casino visits have you stay at the casino normally. You double the restaurant visits (six instead of three) and do the room service and pool bar, plus the spa. The room service can count as one restaurant and you don’t have to report on any restaurants if you have to repeat, if they don’t have enough choices.
On a two night visit, the casino reports stay the same, each of three shifts for the slots and table games, plus poker and bingo, if any. It’s nice because you have more time to fit them in, and can do some of the reports while onsite. With the one-day, you’re rushing around so much to fit everything in that you really can’t do much in the way of reporting onsite.
The two-night visits to the casino hotel usually pay $225 plus a $35 bonus for submitting in time. Probably fifteen to eighteen hours of reports for me.
Obviously, the pay per hour is low. If you get lucky and win, of course, you can make more. It’s only worth it if you enjoy spending time gambling. And eating in decent restaurants and going to the spa. And pool time.
I have decided not to apply for the one-night casino shops any more. Too much work, not enough pay or enjoyment. I might do the two-night casinos again if I was in a mood to gamble. It’s nice to have someone backing your losses.
I would do the hotel-only visits again if it was somewhere I wanted to be the day before and after.
A word on the editing: they can be very picky. On two occasions, I spent at least three hours redoing reports. On a couple shops, the edits were pretty minor and took maybe an hour. On my last hotel-only one, the editor accepted it as submitted. I was amazed, but I had tried to cover each question asked when writing the narratives.
One big thing is you have to expect to pay $1,000 to $2,000 in expenses upfront (unless you get lucky in the casino). I’ve had no problem with reimbursement and pay, but you get it in the normal schedule, the end of the month following.
I would definitely not do these unless you have a credit card (not a debit) that can handle these charges for a month.