One of Las Vegas's hottest hotels is offering a little bit of the Arctic to its heat-fatigued customers.

Caesar's Palace recently opened an Arctic ice room where "snow" gently descends from a domed ceiling through mint-infused air chilled to 13 C.

Spa director Jennifer Lynn says the room is a therapeutic cold treatment used in contrast with saunas and Roman baths.

"Vegas right now, we just came off of a stretch of 21 days where it was over 110 degrees (43 C) so this is definitely a cool respite for all of our hot guests," she told CBC News.

The blue-pebble and mosaic-tile-encrusted room at Qua Baths and Spa is so popular more than 200 a people a day enter its chilly doors.

"It's blue, like a crystally blue, inside of it with iridescenty glass tiles," spa employee Amanda Boyer told CBC News.

"It snows with a hypoallergenic foam and it melts when it hits the ground — the floors are heated."

The Arctic room — where temperatures are still higher than most areas in Nunavut at this time of year — is the latest feature in a booming Las Vegas spa industry. Across the United States, spa revenue has been growing by about 18 per cent a year since 2003 and was worth nearly $10 billion US two years ago, according to the latest numbers from the International Spa Association.

When it opened in November, Qua doubled the size of Caesars' spa to 50,000 square feet, and other spas, such as Spa Bellagio at the Bellagio hotel-casino and Canyon Ranch SpaClub at the Venetian have expanded or are in the process.

Qua's ice room, billed as the only one of its kind in the U.S., comes from the millennia-old European bathing tradition of using snow to cleanse the body, said Don Genders, a partner of Eurospa Technologies, the room's creator. Ice is available in the room for those who want to rub it on steaming skin.

"They built these wooden cabins, heated them up with logs and rocks and would sit in them to sweat to actually cleanse their skin," Genders told the Associated Press.

"The whole idea was that you'd get too hot sitting in the little cabin and you'd use the snow on the ground to wipe your body," he added. "That process of wiping the dirty sweat off your body with snow gets you cold again. So you go back in."

With files from the Associated Press