HIPPODROME
CI: What will be the Hippodrome’s point of
difference? ST: London casinos historically are split into two
types. You’ve got the smart Mayfair casinos which are discreet and elegant and target a small specific market. Then you’ve got the mass market casinos of the 1968 gaming act era when you weren’t allowed to advertise, promote, have live entertainment etc. At one stage you were even taxed on your ratable value, so typically these are in less pleasant locations - often in basements.
We have designed the Hippodrome to make the most of the new regulations. We are on the busiest street corner in whole of the country in an iconic building known by 60% of Londoners already. We have five bars, a 150 cover restaurant, four private dining rooms, three gaming floors, a 200-seat cabaret and entertainment space, a poker deck, a two-level smoking terrace and events spaces throughout the building.
So it is not so much that we have one point of difference, but many.
CI: What’s the management set-up? I gather it’s
a little different… ST: The management is interesting. Going back to
the 1990s the bingo industry went through very similar deregulation and it ushered in the era of big bingo halls with lots of facilities. We had the largest one in the country in Cricklewood and at 60,000 square feet we did the same business of five or six average bingo halls. To make that work we had to have a management team that was the equivalent of a regional set up, with a regional manager, and six or seven actual bingo hall managers; we got a huge premium from that because the quality of management was excellent at all times. It also led to some brilliant brain storming as a result of the concentration of management and a lot of the innovation in bingo came from there.
What’s happened in the casino industry is that a
very similar change has taken place and we need to develop lots of new skill sets to make the most of the new regulations. Having a site the size of the Hippodrome justifies a management structure that is
MARCH 2012 35
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