Reno or Las Vegas?
This is written from the Reno side, so read it with that in mind. It is also honest, because the alternative is useless: if you want the trip Las Vegas is built for, Reno will disappoint you, and we would rather say so here than have you find out on arrival.
The one-line version
Go to Las Vegas if the point of the trip is what happens indoors — the shows, the scale, the spectacle. Go to Reno if the casino is somewhere you sleep and eat between doing things outside. Reno is a mountain town with a casino problem; Vegas is a casino with a desert around it.
Point by point
Scale
Las VegasEnormous. The Strip is a self-contained city of resorts, and the volume of everything — rooms, shows, restaurants — is on a different order.
RenoSmall. Downtown is walkable end to end in about twenty minutes, and you will start recognising people by the second day.
Headline entertainment
Las VegasResidencies by the biggest names in the world, Cirque productions, and a show worth seeing on any given night.
RenoCasino showrooms, touring acts routed through on the way somewhere else, and a genuinely good independent music scene. The rooms are small and the tickets are cheap.
Getting outdoors
Las VegasRed Rock is close and excellent. Beyond that, the desert is the desert.
RenoThis is the whole argument. Lake Tahoe is under an hour, a dozen ski resorts are within ninety minutes, and the city ends about fifteen minutes from downtown in every direction.
Cost
Las VegasCheap rooms subsidised by everything else, and everything else has got markedly more expensive — resort fees, parking, drinks.
RenoCheaper across the board, and especially in winter, when a Reno room can be a fraction of a slopeside rate for the same weekend.
Gambling
Las VegasMore of everything, and the high-limit end is a different world.
RenoLower minimums, fewer people, and dealers who will talk to you. Better if you want to play; worse if you want spectacle.
Getting there
Las VegasDirect flights from nearly everywhere.
RenoA smaller airport with fewer direct routes — but it is eleven minutes from downtown, which is a real and daily advantage over a long taxi line.
Eating
Las VegasCelebrity-chef rooms at a density no other American city matches.
RenoA genuine independent scene in Midtown, casino steakhouses, and a Basque tradition you cannot eat anywhere else in the country outside Boise and Bakersfield.
Two things people get wrong
“Reno is a small Las Vegas”
It is not, and it stopped trying to be twenty years ago. Reno lost its casino monopoly to California’s tribal gaming and spent the time since becoming a manufacturing and logistics town with a university in the middle of it. The casinos are still here and several are very good, but they are no longer what the city is about — which is why the best rooms are on an arterial road in the south rather than under the Arch.
“We’ll do Tahoe as a side trip”
Fair, but pick your shore. The nearest one is under an hour over the Mount Rose Highway; South Lake Tahoe is a considerably longer drive and is better as an overnight than as a day out of Reno. People routinely book the second while planning for the first.