I’m working up a blog post on the expansion of casinos and other various permutations of private gaming (“racinos”, jai alai, etc.), and want to compare the accessibility of gaming today to what it was when it was basically only Las Vegas, Atlantic City or hop on a cruise ship.
I’m looking for something like "70% of America today is within 100 miles of a casino" or “Of the 40 largest cities in America, 37 have some level of gaming within their metropolitan area.”
But all the articles I’ve found so far are just anecdotal, or historical (refer back to the such-and-such Native American Gaming Act, which changed everything).
Does anyone have such a stat?
My basic point, if it matters (and won’t derail the question above too much)… is that casinos are becoming less and less of a successful tourism draw. That if you can gamble in Cleveland or Chicago or Louisville, there’s less allure to come to, say, a Miami Beach if it adds a casino.
Yes I realize the argument’s more complex then that… I’m just looking for some figures at this point
Funny the OP should ask this, it would be a hell of a discussion and it’s an interesting exercise in the prisoner’s dilemma; everyone has to have one because everyone else has one and then everyone loses.
I’m in Detroit today, on business, and last night played poker at the Motor City Casino. The place was clearly not at 100% capacity - not in the poker room, not anywhere. Granted, it was a Wednesday night, but this is a reasonably nice casino in the middle of a metropolitan area of four million people.
Of course, there’s another casino, the MGM Grand, literally a five minute walk away. Not far from there is Greektown… and these were built because of the big Caesar’s across the border in Windsor. And since Detroit went casino crazy, Ohio needed some casinos too, so there are shiny new casinos in Toledo, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, and on and on. As more places added casinos, other jurisdictions, watching the gambling money flow away, felt they needed to build their own.
25 years ago if you wanted to gamble you had to go to Vegas or Atlantic City or a sketchy underground cardroom. Now it’s actually unusual to be inconveniently far from a casino; I could drive quite a distance in any direction from my home and at no point will I be more than an hour and a half, tops, from a casino waiting to take my money.
As a consequence of this, I totally agree with the OP’s premise; one or two casinos is simply not a tourism draw. When Toronto discussed building a huge new casino and claimed it’d being in some jaw-dropping amount of money, I and many others just laughed; who the hell’s going to fly to Toronto to go to a casino? Where are these people coming from they need to go all the way there to play slot machines or a little blackjack? Basically, nowhere. I cannot think of anywhere in North America from where that trip would make any sense at all.
According to this, when gambling came to Pennsylavania in 2006, Atlantic City’s revenues were $5.2 billion. Since then, revenues have dropped to $3 billion.
The subject of the story, by the way, is that the Trump Taj Mahal is hoping to boost its revenues by adding a strip club.
And here’s a story about how Iowa’s gaming industry will take a huge hit if Nebraska ever legalizes casinos.
The Casinos in Vegas are still too crowded for my liking. The casinos by my house are not usually that busy and I doubt very much there are many tourists there gambling. It’s locals, and not happy ones.
At least the Montreal Casino is in an interesting building, in an interesting location. (It used to be the pavilion of France, during the World’s Fair of 1967.)
I understand Casino Windsor took a huge hit when Detroit got its own casinos. Plus, the exchange rate between the US and Canadian dollar is pretty close to 1:1 these days, so the days when American tourists could stretch their dollar in Canada are gone.
Caesar’s Windsor took an ENORMOUS hit; it’s rather plainly visible, really. There is little American traffic there now at all. I guess there’s some appeal to patrons who are 19 but not yet 21, but otherwise it’s almost all locals.
They’ve just announced that the Trump Atlantic City will be closing in September. Showboat will also be closing, and Reval is bankrupt again and will likely close unless they can find a buyer. Meaanwhile, back in February, The Atlantic Club closed. Its all oversaturation.
I’m thinking that local customers are possibly “inferior” in quality from the perspective of the casino.
If you fly all the way to Vegas or Atlantic City for a weekend, you might as well blow $1000 in the casino, right? ($300-500 airline ticket, $150+/night hotel, etc) Otherwise, you won’t have had as much “fun” as your travel costs cost.
If you drive an hour to a business near your house, you’re out about $10 in gas. Maybe throw a few chips in a slot machine and leave after it eats your money.
I’d be interested to see a difference drawn between the racinos and the casinos. The closest “casino” near me is actually the racino at Saratoga but unless you like to play e-craps or slot machines there’s really no draw there. So I’m within, say, 40 minutes of a casino that I almost never go to because of the lack of table games. It’s two hours on the Thruway to get to Turning Stone, three hours to get to Foxwoods and the other places in Connecticut, and I’m pretty sure everything else is further than that.
There might be an interesting discussion just to be had with New Mexico. The largest city, Albuquerque, has by my count at least five casinos within an hour of driving, run by (in approximate distance) the pueblos of Sandia, Isleta, Santa Ana, San Felipe, and Laguna. All of those but Laguna (which is west of Albuquerque on I-40) are within about an hour of Santa Fe as well, which might also have one or two more. At this point basically all the pueblos have a casino as do the Mescalero Apache out near Ruidoso.
I think for Atlantic City (not going to speak for other places) it’s not so much that the local customers are “inferior” as much as it is there are fewer of them. Before the racinos opened, AC *was *the local gambling for NYC - a three hour drive eliminates plane tickets and lots of people went for the day and didn’t need a hotel room . In fact, there used to be a lot of buses from NYC ( and probably Philly ) that offered essentially free day trips to AC- you paid $25 or so for the tickets, and got more than that in free play and comps. I don’t see nearly as many of those buses anymore . Now there are are free buses from Queens,Brooklyn and Manhattan to the racino in Queens which had $696 million in revenue in 2013. And that’s just one racino that’s drawing people from AC ( although I’m certain it is the busiest by far). The only reason to go to AC from NYC is to play table games and if NY State opens a casino in Orange County (or maybe even the Catskills ) Atlantic City will lose those customers as well.
