What Does it Cost to Stay in Westworld?

By Genevieve Burgess | Westworld | October 16, 2016 |

By Genevieve Burgess | Westworld | October 16, 2016 |

While the creators of the show Westworld are doing their best to emphasis the dangerous and somewhat cruel nature of the park, it’s inevitable that viewers would still wonder what it’s actually like to visit. And, perhaps more specifically, how EXPENSIVE it is to visit. Our venerable Lord Castleton recently walked us all through the contract that guests at Westworld have to sign. It’s pretty detailed and for fans of the show it might hold a few hints as to what’s coming up. I know I’ve started wondering about some of the details. Luckily, if you fiddle around on the Discover Westworld site long enough you can actually go through a personality assessment and then the details of booking your stay. I won’t tell you exactly how to unlock it, where’s the fun in that, but I am about to spoil the hell out of what happens if you do. So if you want to go through it yourself, I suggest you head over now and meet the rest of us down in the comments afterwards.

Once you enter the code it gives you to begin your assessment for booking, there’s a short trailer video showing the landscape of Westworld and some of the scenes and characters we’ve seen in the show, as well as some we haven’t. It ends with the words “A world without consequences, without judgement, without limits. Live without limits.” Then you’re launched right into the “Prospective Guest Evaluation” which asks some of the questions that Angela asks William when he arrived, do you have a pre-existing heart condition, do you have a history of mental illness, that sort of thing. But later, it starts to ask some deeper personality questions. Things like “If someone told you that you could halve the world’s population by pressing a button, and that would alleviate most of the world’s poverty, would you do it?” and a true or false statement “Society must have a clear structure or it descends into chaos.” The MOST intriguing question, though, is the second to last one: “You were in a car accident and unfortunately there is nothing left in the wreckage. Luckily you planned ahead and had your entire anatomy measured and mapped, and all of your memories logged and saved. An exact replica is constructed from all this information - is this you?”

I answered honestly for myself, and this showed up in my email box a few minutes later (You can click on any picture to enlarge it):

OK, cool, so time to book my trip! There are three packages; standard, silver, and gold. Standard is suggested for newcomers so let’s see what you get with that:

Neat! But what happens if this is a return trip? Well, that’s where the silver and gold levels come in:

This gives us some EXPLICIT confirmation that returning players have privileges and access that new guests don’t. And it mentions unlocking levels.

But how much does all of this cost? Well, to start with, the minimum length of stay in Westworld is one week, with a required week stay after at their “decompression” resort called Mesa Gold, as explained here:

Here’s what it costs for standard package of two weeks in the park, regular room, with a two week decompression stay after, for a couple:

Nearly $1.6 million for a month’s vacation. $40,000 a day while you’re in the park, $10,000 a day for a single room at the decompression resort, along with several fees to cover monitoring your biometrics, concierge, insurance, and arbitration deposits. But let’s say money’s no object, and you can take as much vacation as you like. The max length of stay is four weeks, plus a couple decompression weeks in a villa. Here’s a four week long Gold package:

Over $1 million per week. If Ed Harris’s Man in Black is a gold level guest, then all his hunting for that maze is costing him $200,000 a day. By the way, there’s no discount for kids. The per-day fee is the same, and there’s an extra $50,000 “Child Park Fee” added on. So we know that all the guests in the park are dropping some truly alarming amounts of money to get in, and are disappearing from the real world for at least two full weeks at a time. We also know that the further you want to go, the more you have to pay and that Delos is explicit about there being multiple levels of the game, and exclusive access for those higher paying guests. Not just to areas or weapons, but specific hosts that aren’t available to the other, standard guests.

Now, I got all of this working on computer where I have a separate tool to take screenshots. I tried to do the assessment again to get a different result on a computer where I had keyboard shortcuts set up. Every time I hit the “shift” button to take a screenshot, the whole screen of the website glitched out and there was audio of Abernathy saying “You should go, leave. Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Which almost seems like a warning to prospective guests. But I went through the whole process and got an email thanking me for booking my stay so if an android shows up and demands $1.6 million from me, I’m trusting all of you to take up a collection for my first-hand research. If I don’t come back, avenge my death.