In this month alone, at least four states – Florida, Hawaii, Michigan and Pennsylvania – have made fresh overtures towards the casino sector for allowing entry or expansion. With tourism numbers down and the economy still sluggish, no doubt there will soon be more states lining up to roll the dice.

For destinations looking to gamble all your chips and sell your soul to a casino mogul, there’s a few things you should know first – about how Sin City has refined casino marketing into a fine art. Here’s a few examples:-

Encore Carpet

Sleep Deprivation:- What’s Sin City’s secret sauce that stops bleary eyed gamblers from calling it a night?

From the flashing neon outside and the garish lighting inside to the free flow of alcohol and the magic carpets, everything is meant to be a wake-up call for a gambler about to quit.

These magic carpets don’t fly, but the extravagant color patterns and designs assault the senses and keep casino customers wide awake all night long.

No exit

No Exit:- Once you’re inside, they want you to forget the world outside. So there’s no windows or clocks to remind you of the time of day (or night).

CityCenter’s ARIA casino is an exception, designed to utilize natural light to reduce energy consumption.

They make it easy for you to enter, but not so easy to exit. Casinos in Vegas have many entrances and escalators leading in from all sides, but only a select few leading out.

Airport slot machines

In-flight Entertainment:- If you’re in Vegas or on your way, you can run from the slots, but you can’t hide. McCarran Airport has over 1, 234 slot machines all over the terminals.

Las Vegas Sands Corp. even bought two L-1011 planes which it intends to modify and outfit with baccarat tables, to be used by gamblers being ferried by Sands from Asia to its Las Vegas casinos.

Not to be left behind, even the waters in Las Vegas aren’t immune. The Hard Rock Resort’s swimming pool offers a floating craps table.

Comp City

Comp Clubs:- To reel in a big whale, casinos will offer the world in comps, from free group transport (see above) to hotel suites with butler service, shopping trips, exclusive event tickets and club access, and even loss rebates – where the casino gives you back a percentage of your loss. 

Comp Clubs are a more down-to-earth rewards program which reward casino play for regulars – Sin City’s version of loyalty club memberships. Basically everything else you can get for free, provided you spend enough on casino play.

There’s Harrah’s Total Rewards, MGM Mirage has the Players Club, etc. The Las Vegas Advisor rewards book is a good place to find out what’s on offer.

Everything you see in Vegas – from the monumental exteriors to the fantasy worlds inside, from cheap hotel rooms to comps, all of it is focused on maximizing opportunities for gambling, ensuring that visitors stay and play longer, and keep coming back for more.

Photo credits:- No exit – intergalactic hussy; Encore carpet – David G. Schwartz; Airport slots – Jérôme; Comp City – Max Rubin

There are around 6 million good reasons why the Shamu show will never end at Sea World Orlando, inspite of the tragic ‘killing’ of trainer Dawn Brancheau on Feb 24, 2010 by Tilikum aka Tilly – a 30 year old 12,300 pound bull Orca.

Believe, Seaworld Orlando

The coverage of the incident has mostly focused on who was at fault in the specific incident – whether Tilly had gone rogue, or it was the trainer’s fault.

But the fact that it happened at the end of the show has a lot of significance. Flashback to 1987, and there’s a lesson that Sea World seems to have forgotten.

On Nov 21, 1987 at Sea World San Diego, a trainer got squashed by an Orca named Orky. It led to a wave of lawsuits, investigations and public protests, which eventually unearthed that the orcas had inflicted a series of injuries on trainers in the period leading up to the Nov 21 incident.

To be specific - 14 injuries in a 4 month period from Aug-Nov 1987, with trainers being rammed, bitten and dragged. It also came to light that Orky was forced to perform inspite of being partially blind and in bad health.

Sea World made a mea culpa, promised a review and new safety measures. Meanwhile the show went on, but the trainers were temporarily not allowed into the water with the orcas.

Fast-forward to Saturday, Feb 27, 2010, with Sea World announcing that the show begins today after a brief 3-day hiatus. Pending a review of the Feb 24 incident, the trainers won’t be allowed into the water. In a press conference, SeaWorld CEO Jim Atchison said “we will make improvements and changes and move forward.”

Some of the Orcas have been doing 8 shows a day, 365 days a year. Orcas are intelligent creatures, and there’s a daily and on-going struggle for control between them and the trainers, to show who is in charge – it plays out in the form of rewards, food, isolation, disobidience, etc. Added to that is the frustration of being caged and not being able to develop the familial support structure and communication that orcas need and develop in pods in the wild.

Jason Hribal, author of Fear of the Animal Planet, reveals how the Orcas have learnt that the end is the most critical part of the show, and an Orca with a gripe will plan a disruption and simply stop performing or protest in some way just before the end. Sea World has routines in place to deal with this – they switch whales and engage the audience with lectures and videos.

This is where Dawn Brancheau’s death and Tilly’s attempt to ‘punish’ her draw parallels with the 1987 orca rebellion. Tilly did what he did was because he had something new to gripe about – other than being caged for 28 years, forced to perform shows, and used as a guinea pig for helping Sea World develop its artificial insemination process. It also means that there will likely have been more such incidents in the past few months involving Tilly and other orcas.

This brings us to the question of why Sea World is still doing something which is wrong on so many levels. The rewards are plain enough – around 6 million annual visitors (2008 figures) to Sea World Orlando alone, with the Shamu shows as the center-piece. Private equity firm Blackstone purchased Busch Entertainment (which owns the Sea World parks) for $2.3 billion last year.

Sea World’s Orcanomy has grown so huge that they now own 25 of the 42 orcas in captivity. Since it is illegal to capture or import orcas from the wild, they have refined artificial insemination techniques which make it possible for them to refresh the stock via breeding (Tilly has sired 13 offspring).

End game – Dawn Brancheau’s death was not an accident, Tilly is not a killer and maybe has some health issues. The show will not end, and Sea World will go the extra mile to keep the orcas happy for now. But this will happen again. What the orcas really need is a labor rep and a retirement plan, since OSHA doesn’t seem able or willing to help them.

On Feb 25, 2010, the United States Senate passed the Travel Promotion Act and sent the bill to President Obama for his signature.

Senate passes Travel Promotion Act

The landmark legislation establishes a public-private partnership to promote the US as a travel destination and clarify US security policies to foreign travelers.

The Senate had already passed it’s own version (S. 1023) of the bill last year, and so had the House (HR1299). After the House sent it back to the Senate with an amendment, it got held up in the Senate as the healthcare bill took center-stage. 

The cloture vote for concurring with the House amendment was originally scheduled for Friday morning, but the vote was moved up to Thursday after the healthcare summit, and got bipartisan support this time, passing by a huge margin of 78-18 votes.

The Travel Promotion Act creates the Corporation for Travel Promotion whose activities will be funded through a matching program featuring up to $100 million in private sector contributions and a $10 fee on foreign travelers who do not pay $131 for a visa to enter the United States.

The fee will be collected once every two years in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security’s Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA). No money is provided by U.S. taxpayers.

The U.S. Travel Association deserves a lot of the credit for pursuing the passage of this legislation tirelessly ever since its introduction in May last year, and so do the bill’s supporters in Congress - Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND) who introduced it in the Senate, and also Senators Reid, Ensign and Klobuchar in the Senate and Representatives Delahunt, Blunt and Farr in the House.

Jonathan Tisch, Chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels and Chairman Emeritus of the U.S. Travel Association, said that “We could never have accomplished this common sense policy without our champions in Congress and the White House, and without the united and passionate voice of the travel community.”

Related posts:-
2010 Legislative Agenda for the Travel Industry
Nuts & Bolts of the Travel Promotion Act

Of late, there’s been a lot of chatter about the benefits of independent hotels. Most of the debate has been centred around the value of the brand name vs the royalty, loss of control, etc. But the real value provided to a hotelier by a big operator doesn’t get noticed or published all that much.

Consider the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG), encompassing 645,000 rooms in over 4,400 hotels spread over seven brands and 100 countries. During the first six months of 2009, 66% of total room revenue was booked at these hotels through IHG channels or by the 47 million Priority Club members.

Aside from reservations, there are many more ways in which IHG helps hoteliers reduce costs and improve revenues and customer service. Here’s a few examples:-

IHG Onboard

Onboard:- IHG’s hectic pace of new hotel openings (439 globally and 375 in the US in 2009) requires a strategic plan – deliver what hotels need, when they need it.

To add another layer, IHG wanted the plan to be flexible enough to incorporate changes in tune with new hotel innovation. This they accomplished through a program created in 2006, called Onboard.

IHG mapped out the sequence of steps involved in the opening process, and created a map that depicted the journey of a new owner from selecting the IHG brand to an open and operating hotel.

Onboard breaks up this process into an 8-phase approach, with IHG only sending the hotelier the opening materials needed for the current phase.

Results - Revenue and bookings jumped over 50% on opening day for hotels that opened using Onboard. As an added bonus, IHG saves $133,000 in shipping and printing costs with the new kits.

Hotel-in-a-Box

Hotel-in-a-Box:- Selection of tech vendors for an IHG hotel has been refined into a very precise operation by means of a collaboration with IBM, which created an integrated technology package called Hotel-in-a-Box.

Under this arangement, there are no piecemeal purchases, vendor negotiations or integration issues.

For all their requirements, IHG franchisees simply pick from a list of certified vendors, each of whom has already agreed to offer below-market rates, and their products and solutions have been tested to make sure they integrate seamlessly with others on the list.

Results – Savings of 10% off the overall installation cost, one window tech support via IBM, and 50% reduction in technology installation and implementation timeframe.

Green Engage

Green Engage:- The debate over whether being green helps a hotel attract more customers is still open, but there is no doubt that green practices reduce costs and conserve resources for the hotel. The way it works is simple but effective.

Hotels directly input data on site, and the system compares the data against IHG hotels of a similar nature across the world and lists a series of actions that the hotel can take to reduce waste and consumption of energy and water.

Results – Offers hoteliers potential energy savings of upto 25%. IHG estimates that if all their hotels adopt Green Engage, it would lead to a combined savings of $200 million.

Virtually Me

Virtually Me:- Virtually Me is a human-computer interaction system that will be able to catch public broadcasts pertaining to guests’ personal needs and preferences from their mobile devices.

On the other end it will provide the hotel property with precise matching information to help improve the guest’s stay. A hotel will know if a guest is a priority loyalty customer, and things like musical tastes, health information and food choices.

This will help the hotel prepare for guest arrivals by pre-setting rooms with the preferred music and ambient temperature, making sure room service is able to fulfill requests, etc.

Bill Peer, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), says that Virtually Me will be a reality in four years. He made a really neat presentation (see videos – 1, 2, 3) about Virtually Me at Genesys G-Force Orlando last year.