There are approximately 60 wedding chapels in and around Las Vegas. In fact, your question inspired us to fill a notable gap and add to the ever-expanding free content on our site with a comprehensive listing of all the casino and non-casino wedding chapels in this town, their times, prices, and the special, unusual, and in some cases downright bizarre services they offer. Just click the link to go directly to the new wedding pages, or find them listed under "Vegas Info" on the home page.
Although we have precisely 52 venues listed, we can't give you an exact answer to your question about the total number of chapels. This is because some are currently under renovation and off the radar, while others have "sister" chapels that aren’t listed anywhere, don't have telephone numbers, and hence are not technically alternative venues, but are used by the main chapel to accommodate any overspill in busy periods. We did find a 53rd venue, but for some reason the proprietress didn’t want to provide any contact details or be listed on our site, so we're ignoring that one.
We can offer up a more precise answer to your last question, however, which is that the Clark County Recorder's Office says it currently records approximately 400 marriages a day, with a total of 113,000 having taken place from January to early December of this year, the most up-to-date statistics available when we researched this answer. Many of these take place in the aforementioned chapels, of course, while others are in more traditional venues, including the more than 500 places of worship to which Las Vegas is home, plus the Office of Civil Marriages downtown. Still others take place in private gardens, in hot-air balloons and helicopters, on horseback, in gondolas, or even on board a pirate ship (apparently, a mother-in-law once had the groom put in the gallows on board TI's ship, while she told him in no uncertain terms how to treat her daughter).
If you want to be kidnapped by cowboys, beamed up by Captain Kirk, serenaded by Elvis, or even married in the front car of a roller coaster, Vegas is definitely the venue for you.
If things don't work out as planned, it's also home to the quickie divorce, although interestingly, those numbers have been steadily declining in recent years, down from 13,697 in 2001 to 11,834 last year.
As far as the "best" chapel is concerned, that's a tough one. To some extent, you get what you pay for, which can be anything from less than $100 up to $20,000 or more, and that's before you've started popping the bubbly. But "best" is such a subjective term, so it really depends on what you're looking for -- classy? kitsch? themed? drive-through? Not to sound too self-serving, but our best advice is to pick up a copy of our own guide book, Neon Nuptials: The Complete Guide to Las Vegas Weddings. And complete it is: Written by well-known travel writer Ken Van Vechten, it's an independent, no-holds-barred, fun, and critical venue-by-venue guide to how and where to get married in Las Vegas. We consider it a must for anyone considering a Las Vegas wedding.
As far as popularity is concerned, the Little White Chapel claims to host approximately 30,000 weddings a year, which, if accurate means that this one venue alone conducts more than a quarter of all ceremonies conducted annually in Clark County. Numerous celebrities have tied the knot at the Little White Wedding Chapel, including Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, Joan Collins and Peter Holm, Michael Jordan and Juanita Vanoy, and Britney Spears and Jason Alexander (not the one from Seinfeld) ... Hmm. Not such a great track record.
The Little Church of the West is another favorite with the stars, including Zsa Zsa Gabor and George Sanders, Betty Grable and Harry James, Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford, David Cassidy and Kay Lenz, Fernando Llamas and Arlene Dahl, Robert Goulet, Greg Allman, Shirley Bassey, Ray Conniff, Broderick Crawford, Deanna Durbin, James Farentino, Rhonda Fleming, Red Foxx, Judy Garland, Bob Geldof, Dudley Moore, Buck Owens, Mickey Rooney, David Sanborn, Telly Savalas, Heather Thomas, Mel Torme, Dinah Washington, and many others. The Little Church of the West is also one of the oldest wedding chapels in Las Vegas, opening in 1942 on the the grounds of the Last Frontier Hotel-Casino.
