Tourist trap

Tourist traps can also be far more subtle or devious in their design. For example, on the Las Vegas Strip (a tourist trap of its own), there are many hotels that feature attractions you must pay to enter and enjoy, that then spit you out in some shop instead of just returning you to the entry point. This particularly insipid design philosophy just rubs me wrong; it's as if the attraction owner is saying "thanks for paying to get into my attraction; please feel free to pay again on your way out!".

There's tons of these layouts:

• Mandalay Bay's Shark Reef aquarium* is a self-guided tour that ends in an ocean-themed gift shop.
• Luxor's The Tomb and Museum of King Tutankhamun* is a self-guided tour that ends in an Egyptian-themed gift shop.
• Luxor's IMAX Theater* spits moviegoers out onto the second floor of an arcade, which only features one escalator, coming up to the second floor from the first; moviegoers must wander around the second floor to find stairs to walk down, then maneuver out of the arcade, to escape.
• Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum* is a self-guided tour that ends in a gift shop.
• The Bellagio's Gallery of Fine Art* is self-guided, and exits where it begins, but staff actually usher people into the gift shop when they exit the exhibit.
• The MGM Grand's lion habitat exhibit is free. The transparent tunnel that allows viewers to be "surrounded" by the exhibit is "one way", sometimes even guarded by rent-a-cops, and its exit leads straight into a lion-themed gift shop.

The Luxor's IMAX is the worst offender by far, forcing you through two floors of kids and noisy machines before finally setting you free back onto the attractions level. That there's only an up escalator and not a down one is more salt in the average tourist's wounds, mostly because its presence implies there might be a down escalator somewhere even when there isn't.

Like telemarketing and spam, I believe this particular kind of trap only works because enough people are stupid enough to fall for it that it's profitable. And before you ask, no, I've never made a purchase from one of these insipid shops.

Another version of this trap can be seen in all the casinos that sit on the strip, and that make it easy to get into them (with moving walkways all the way from the street to their front door) but impossible to get out (no moving walkways headed back out, construction or design preventing two-way travel, so no backtracking, etc.). Caesar's Palace is guilty of this in the extreme.

See also the Bally's monorail (temporarily out of commission for construction as of February 2003), which connects two hotels nearly two miles apart, but requires a good three quarter-mile walk to reach from either hotel; it's literally faster to walk the strip between Bally's and MGM Grand than it is to walk to the very back of these hotels from the strip, take the monorail, and walk all the way back out to the strip again.