REALITY CHECK: The Sky Is NOT Falling, Chicken Little

…and the casino industry is not on the verge of crashing…

  I want to share with you an alternative to the gloom-and-doom prophesies about the future of casinos once reopening begins. I think this is a new boon for the industry; we are on the verge of a windfall for casinos …if we handle this right.

I read a lot of posts, stories, and “news” telling me that the road to recovery for the casino business is going to be long, slow, and never back to the heydays.

BAH!

I am telling you that once the doors open, it will be like grand-opening week all over again ―if we properly prepare!

What those ruin-on-the-horizon soothsayers of catastrophe really mean is “we messed up in our financing schemes and leveraged our properties beyond what they can ever pay back because we had conned investors into a hand-to-mouth existence.”

Look, the gambling public has been locked away and unable to visit our casinos. They are hungry to get back to their favorite joint. They are eager to watch those video reels spin. Even if we shut down every-other-machine and keep folks six-feet apart, they still are going to flock to the casinos once they CAN.

This is ESPECIALLY true if we provide in-advance enticements and take extraordinary steps to keep them coming back. In fact, we are going to have the opportunity for a complete reset. The returning customer experience can be an entirely new chance to build (or strengthen) the relationship.

Right now ―TODAY― marketing should be sending out a direct mail piece making an offer they can’t refuse and touting all the safety standards that will be in place.

Right now ―TODAY― events and giveaways should be lined up for the opening… regardless of when the opening actually happens.

Right now ―TODAY― slot hosts should be telephoning the customer base to keep the relationships alive and promising over-the-top enticements upon return.

Right now ―TODAY― F&B should be putting together a safety plan that instills confidence.

When people come back, they will be expecting a new day. Don’t give them same-ole-same-ole; don’t give them what it was like just before the shutdown. Give them a reason to call your casino THEIR casino; give them a reason to come HOME to THEIR casino.

This truly is an opportunity to reset a grand opening crowd with new expectations, new levels of service, and new excitement.

Will there be failures because of the quarantines? A catastrophic failure may well happen to some goofball finance schemes; but not to the market and not to the number of customers or how much they spend.

You know, in that regard, it’s not unlike the past bankruptcies of Atlantic City casinos. Objectively, Atlantic City has one of the highest slot machine win-per-unit-per-day metrics in the country; roughly twice what the Las Vegas Strip has. Yet mention Atlantic City and the connotation is that it died. Now think about that: if Atlantic City is generating more revenue than most others, then where was the failure? Clearly in the operators; the management and the owners. Or as The New York Post described one of the failures, “the casino that took Wall Street for $2.5 billion”.

Yes there WILL be failures because of Covid-19; but those failures will be because of bad financing deals or out-and-out scams to investors. There will be no failures of customers to come back or to spend.

Well run commercial casinos and most of Indian Country have the opportunity not to merely bounce back but to thrive.

In my eyes, the bigger challenge is not if we survive when the doors reopen; the REAL challenge is how are we going to take advantage of the do-over grand opening and increase revenue!

…and I have some very specific strategies for that, too.