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For those who enjoy your local casino, you’ll soon come across new loyalty schemes. National chains have these cards in place and you can bank on other big operators to follow suit. Paul Sculpher looks into what’s it all about.
If you’ve been a casino-goer in the UK, you’ll occasionally see a bigger punter invited into the restaurant for something to eat, or maybe you hear of people being taken out on race trips or something similar. You might even have been lucky enough to be treated yourself, perhaps to a meal or maybe a free drink from the bar from a friendly casino manager. These “comps” (short for complimentary) are the casino’s way of rewarding their big spending customers for their trade, and in the past were generally given out in a very haphazard way. Casino managers would face the tedious task of recording every player’s cash drop (amount bought in for) and cashouts, to work out what they were losing over time. They’d then look at the numbers (hopefully over a long period—we all know the danger of a small sample size) to get an idea of who’d be asked along on the Ascot trip, or who’d be welcome to a meal or two, compliments of the management.
That system’s been in place for decades in the UK, but for much of that time our foreign counterparts have been light years ahead of us. Go to any casino in Las Vegas, for example, and you’ll immediately be encouraged—possibly even nagged—to sign up to their loyalty scheme, and be given your loyalty card as part of the package. You use this card at the tables (handing it to the dealer) or the slots (plugging it into the card reader) and your play will be tracked. This isn’t as menacing as it sounds, however, as the whole point is that they keep a record of all your bets to establish how good a player you are. The points you build up can then be used against the costs of your stay: your food, room cost and even show tickets and so on, as well as, usually, bonus credits on the slots.
So what’s changed in the UK? Well, the law, that’s what. The Gambling Act 2005 took over from the old Gaming Act 1968, to make proper loyalty schemes legal over here. It’s a massive step forward for the UK casino industry, giving them a key weapon in the permanent fight to get hold of your leisure pound. While they tend to be expensive to put in place—hence the smaller independent operators may be put off their implementation—it looks likely that to be competitive in any given casino market, they’ll be absolutely vital.
Of course, there are a couple of interesting differences between a Vegas-style market and your local town. In Vegas, with it being a vacation town, many of the redemptions tend to be toward room costs, with most visitors spending a lot of time gambling in the hotel where they’re staying. But in the UK, hotels aren’t part of the equation, which is why the early loyalty schemes in the UK allowed redemptions for gaming chips. When much of your UK regular trade might visit 50 times per year and come in not for a general leisure night out but specifically to gamble, you have to offer them something that they’re interested in. This has the added advantage of reducing costs. After all, it’s widely believed that by allowing people to redeem their points for chips, all that happens is that serious players just play for longer with the extra money, eventually losing it and costing you nothing.
The other major difference is in the basic reason for running these schemes abroad. In the US, punters just walk into the casino to play, and management basically never get to find out who they are unless they ask. This in itself is a good enough reason to have a loyalty scheme, as it provides those all-important contact details (along with a detailed play record) so that the marketing department can get in touch with offers and so on. In the UK, while the marketing benefits in terms of segmentation are still outstanding, traditionally all players had to be members, so you had all those details on file anyway (although this is changing now). The purpose of the schemes in the UK from a management perspective is to lock players into the casino through the use of the card, and also to rationalise what was a hopelessly inefficient system in the past. There’s also the benefit in terms of competition with other forms of gambling; a casual roulette machine player is much better off playing in a casino earning points than sitting in a betting shop getting nothing but evil looks from the queue of people waiting to get on the machine.
So, as a punter, what do you do ? Well, get signed up for a start, which shouldn’t take too long. Outside of that, make sure you have all your play rated and start racking up those points. It might not seem like much on a day-to-day basis, but it all adds up and before you know it you’ll be picking up the odd free meal or day trip. It’s throwing money away not to get involved.
How to get in the loyalty-scheme good books
Most loyalty schemes work out your total stake, along the lines of the following formula: average bet multiplied by hands (or spins) per hour multiplied by time played. So, if they estimate your average bet at £5, and think you get 40 spins per hour on roulette, and you play for three hours, your total stake would be 5 x 40 x 3, for £600. They then work out your “expected” or “theoretical” loss, based on the house edge percentage. The house edge percentage on roulette is 2.7 percent, so the stats say on average you’d lose just over £15 during that roulette session. I know it usually seems a lot more expensive than that, but you occasionally win too. They then simply rebate a percentage of this expected loss, for example 20 percent. In our example then, for your roulette session you end up with about £3 worth of points—just enough for a nice pint. Can’t argue with that. |
