Frankly it tracks that almost no one was caught before.
How? How does this track?
Cigarette smoking is very conspicuous. I know, I used to smoke. It's not easy to hide!
If you smoke inside, it will smell like smoke. Fabric and even plaster in walls will hold onto smoke for a long time. Not to mention the smoke smell goes under doors, too, so someone outside the room could smell it.
If someone smokes in a room and you walk in any time in the next 12 hours, you will be able to tell. That means the cleaning staff should be able to detect smoke very well. Keep in mind, this is assuming you don't set off the smoke alarms, which is ALSO very easy to do in a hotel room because the ceilings are very low!
The only way around this is smoking outside, like on a balcony. Which, I'm sure, is against the rules too - but it doesn't harm anyone if you can't even detect it, so I'm not sure it's a problem.
Places like Vegas have a huge amount of recreational sales to tourists. They're clearly smoking the product somewhere, and it's not on the casino floor. One might bet they are engaging in some amount of activity with the potential to generate revenue for the hotel.
Hotel cleaning staff could be an exception, I don't know, it would strike me as a mildly but not hugely surprising one.
That's why they demand a deposit (or a card), by the way.
There's no way to conceal cigarette smoke indoors. It's painfully obvious that a room's been smoked in.
Vapes are way lower-key, and as a non-smoker/vaper/etc, unlike cigarettes, someone vaping in a space really doesn't bother me.