Monthly Archives

March 2016

ExpressExpense News

Las Vegas Taxi

Las Vegas has the highest concentration of taxis in the world.  Las Vegas has put together a nice Las Vegas Taxi – TOP 10 list to help visitors understand how their highly regulated taxi system – works.

The city of Las Vegas also provides a useful guide for all passengers.  This guide contains fare rates,  cost estimates, common taxi questions, important Las Vegas taxi facts and a map of the major cacin0 properties.  We’ve linked to the Las Vegas Taxi Rider Information Program below.  It can also be obtained by visiting http://taxi.nv.gov/.

2016-03-30_06-28-36
Las Vegas Taxi Authority - Taxi Rider Information Program - front

The current (08-2015) taxi fare rates for Las Vegas are as follows:

Initial Activation of taximeter: $3.50
Each additional 1/12 mile: $0.23 ($2.76 per mile)
Waiting time per hour: $32.40
McCarran Property (each pick up): $2.00
3% Excise tax will be added to all rates and fees

Here are a few Las Vegas taxi facts:

Las Vegas taxi drivers are required to provide a receipt upon request.  If they do not provide a taxi receipt at your request, you can visit http://taxi.nv.gov/ or create a taxi receipt yourself to suit your needs using one of our taxi templates.

Las Vegas taxi rates are some of the highest in the world.    Use a Rate Finder online or on your mobile phone to get an idea of taxi rates from point-to-point.  Or, consider using a Ride Share fare estimator if you plan to use Uber or Lyft services.

Below is an estimate of taxi fares between the McCarran International Airport and the most common hotel properties.

LAS VEGAS DESTINATION APPROXIMATE FARE

FROM AIRPORT

ARIA $20.20
BALLY’S $21.20
BELLAGIO $21.95
CAESAR’S PALACE $21.20
CIRCUS CIRCUS $28.90
COSMOPOLITAN $22.15
THE CROMWELL $19.30
FLAMINGO $19.75
HARRAH’S $21.20
LUXOR $18.25
MANDALAY BAY $20.05
MGM $16.40
MIRAGE $23.65
MONTE CARLO $20.05
PALACE STATION $27.63
PARIS $21.00
RIO $25.35
RIVIERA $26.80
STRATOSPHERE $25.00
THE LINQ $21.68
TREASURE ISLAND $25.75
VENETIAN $26.45
WYNN $22.00
ExpressExpense News

Faster, Better, Stronger

Work it, make it, do it, makes us
Harder, better, faster, stronger
We’ve spent 4 weeks getting our server migrated from a pokey GoDaddy Shared account to a lighting-fast Linode VPS system.   You can read more about Linode vs GoDaddy here: For the Love of Linode.
Why did we change?  More reasons than we first thought!  We initially needed emails to be sent instantly – instead of in batches every 5, 10 or 20 minutes like GoDaddy likes to do.  We also were tired of outages on GoDaddy that seemed to be happening once or twice a week for anywhere from 2 – 30 minutes.  We noticed through our Pingdom account that these were occurring and then tried to request support from GoDaddy.  GoDaddy’s response was, “this is a shared hosting solution and we have an issue that we’re going to resolve.”  I requested to move off of that particular server and was told that it is not possible.  Goodbye GoDaddy…Hello Linode.
More than, hour, our, never
Ever, after, work is, over
As it turns out, there were probably a few solutions to solve our email problem – the easiest one being to utilize Google Apps for email and then connect to their SMTP server for outgoing mail.
The more difficult one is to establish your own mail server using Postfix, Dovecot and MySQL.  This works fine – except there are all sorts of challenges in getting your mail server to properly send mail and NOT be considered SPAM by other mail servers.  You also need to maintain your own SPAM filters and then run another web system on your VPS to actually display email (Squirrel, CubeMail or others).  This was turning out to be a major science project – and all we wanted to do was send (and receive email).  No thanks… Google Apps is $50 a year and solves all of these problems.
Work it, make it, do it, makes us
Harder, better, faster, stronger
Once we made the transition to Linode, we also decided to clean up some other things.  We improved the user feedback system by implementing UserVoice.  This gives us the ability to quickly respond to user comments/questions quickly and documents the workflow for us.  We’ve built templates within UserVoice to allow instant responses to common issues.  These common issues can also be published as Knowledge Base articles and made available to users on our site.  Try it for yourself and see the improvement.  Our OLD comment form is here.  And the new one can be seen in action on the site.
Work it harder
Make it better
Do it faster
Makes us stronger