With COVID-19 encouraging people to stay at home, casinos have looked for a variety of ways to engage with players. One of the options that came out of this was the promotion of free to play online social casinos.
I noticed that the Hard Rock Social Casino was getting advertised in Atlantic City during the COVID-19 downtime. I had previously only seen it as being advertised as part of the Seminole Hard Rock in Hollywood, Fla., and I wrote about that app awhile ago.
However, now the app has been expanded, so you can use it in other markets such as Atlantic City and Biloxi. The features available in each market vary. For instance, in Biloxi, you can link your card and redeem hearts for comps, just as you can in Hollywood. Atlantic City does not have card linking capabilities as of this writing, and therefore no comps are available for purchase as a reward.
To have an account for each market, you must register separately. That means separate email addresses. You can have one linked to Facebook and the rest not as one way to work through this issue, but the email address attached to Facebook is likely unusable for a separate account accordingly.
Tampa is also promoting the app, but if you try to link your Wild Card and have already signed up through Hollywood when the app was exlcusive to that market, you’ll get an error that the card is already linked to another account.
If Tampa is your home casino and not Hollywood (given they’re a few hours apart), I’m not sure how they’re addressing that. The comps on my account only show Hollywood options. In some cases they can move comps from one location to another, so perhaps that’s how they’re addressing it.
Even in Hollywood, when I logged in to update the review, I noticed that on the web, the various comps you could purchase with your hearts appears to have gone away. However, on the app, the rewards were still there.
As a refresher, Hard Rock’s reward points earning structure differs from Foxwoods (which uses the same app platform) in that you could only earn hearts through purchases, so effectively comps were a sort of rebate for money spend. The redemption levels then and now improves as you got to higher heart amounts, which of course means more spending. I’m also seeing an expiration date on the rewards earned, which I don’t recall seeing before.
By comparison, Foxwoods allowed (and still allows) for hearts to be earned in the app through level ups and a lucky wheel spin, without spending a single dollar on coins. That could encourage more play (and ultimately, more purchases). Foxwoods also gives a better heart conversion ratio for purchases. I don’t recall an expiration on points earned in the Foxwoods Online app either.
It’s possible that more markets will be added and card linking abilities expanded, but at the end of the day this ultimately only rewards those who like to buy social casino coins to play on their phones or computers, and would rather have some comp earning possibilities with their home casinos for their spend.
