On a social casino group, I recently saw a player lamenting what he felt was an unfair reward system when it comes to casino offers. The example he gave was as follows, regarding two separate players:
- Player 1 visits weekly with a $250 budget. Player 1 therefore spends $1,000 a month at the casino, on average.
- Player 2 visits monthly with a $500 budget. Plater 2 therefore spends $500 a month at the casino on average.
The offers Player 2 gets are consistently better than the offers Player 1 gets. He felt this was unfair, because Player 1 was spending twice as much at the casino than Player 2. Therefore, shouldn’t he get better offers?
What this illustrates is simple confusion around how many casinos design offers.
Coin-In Per Visit is More Important Than Overall Budget Over Time
One suggestion I’ve always made if you want better offers is to simply consolidate your trips and spend the same budget over one trip than multiple. The reasoning is simple – if you come four times a month, you’re claiming benefits four times a month, so the casino is going to divide your offers into segments that can be claimed each visit.
For that $1,000 player, that means each offer will be set based on an expected loss of $250. Or, more accurately, it will be set based on the average coin-in that $250 can deliver for that player. For aggressive players who bomb out quickly, you might be underbankrolled for your wagers and therefore showing less coin-in than that $250 might normally imply on average. That will simply pull down your average and your offers will decrease with it.
By comparison, that $500 a visit player will likely be able to stretch his bankroll more successfully, getting closer to the expected average coin-in mathematically, but more importantly getting offers that reflect that higher play. Of course, they can also play over what their bankroll would allow and bomb out quickly, but with more money, they’ll simply have more overall coin-in as a general rule, and with that better offers.
Some casinos calculate your value based on your average daily theoretical (ADT). Some others will calculate your value based on trips, especially markets where multi-day visits are common (The Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas was a great example of this pre-acquisition, but will likely evolve as it folds into MGM).
What’s in common is that more frequent visits with lower budgets will simply score lower than less frequent visits with higher budgets, even if the annual spend differs.
Use of Resources Counts
A weekly player will be using casino facilities four times a month. Whether it’s a hotel room, dining credits, shopping with comp dollars, you’re using more resources that have to be replenished. A monthly visitor will only use that hotel room once, have that meal once, and so on.
This is one reason why less frequent visitors sometimes will see a better offer than simply a proportional bump – if both players use one night hotel each visit, it’s going to be a similar cost per visit per player for that, but one player is only using it once while the other is using it four times. This means the monthly player might see a bump in hotel room level, or other comps around the visit, because there’s just more money to go around given the level of usage of that player.
Don’t believe me? I shared a post awhile ago from a former host who confirmed this exact scenario – hosts will be more likely to reward the less-frequent player with the higher budget because they don’t use as many resources, and the casino will make more money on that less-frequent player because they come with a higher per-visit budget. That makes them the more profitable choice.
One Likely Has More Room to Grow Than The Other
The more frequently you visit the casino, the less likely there’s room to move on your budget. That weekly visitor spending $250 is probably already spending what they have for the casino each month; getting another visit is at best going to yield another $250, but more likely spread that $1,000 across five visits vs. four – not really helpful to growing their bottom line.
That less frequent casino visitor though may very well have the means to provide more money if they take a bonus trip. Perhaps the casino thinks they’re splitting their time across multiple casinos and wants to try to take a larger share of that money. So they’re going to do what they can to lure that player out more often.
This becomes especially clear when players are going multiple times a week, doing longer trips frequently and so on, compared to the one who comes out a few times a year. One player is basically maxing out what they can get because they’re simply there all the time. The other has room to grow, in the casino’s mind.
Is this making assumptions? Absolutely! But the casinos have data on all of us thanks to the players card. Hundreds of thousands or millions of players later, with plenty of sessions generated on that user base, will yield all sorts of data findings and the offers follow all of that logic and math.
If you visit frequently and are wondering why your offers are capped, the most obvious reason is that the casino basically feels they’re getting what they can from your play already and there’s no reason to bump that up. Changing up your visit frequency and reallocating your budget accordingly can be an easy way to shake that up.
