HIPPODROME BIRTHDAY
something that people want. But strong healthy competition between us has to be good to improve the market.
CI: What’s the revenue split between casinos,
shows and F&B? ST: The income is 80-85% gaming, but the
importance of the bar, restaurant, hospitality and events space should not be underestimated. First, it’s a good margin – better than gaming – but more importantly, it supports gaming. We have a great restaurant and also a 24-hour menu, so people come in for food, and once they’re here there is more chance of play. We have great event spaces, we have superb entertainment choices, the restaurant pulls in different people and our six bars are staggering. The bar on the smoking terrace is said to be the busiest in Westminster after 2am, but because they are in the casino environment, we have no trouble at all in the bars because we don’t tolerate it and customers like that as well.
CI: Have any games surprised you with their
success? ST: Roulette and Blackjack are the mainstay games
and are doing very well indeed; Casino War has been tried by a couple of other casinos and not much has happened with it, but it’s proving very popular for us, perhaps because of the tourists we have coming in. It’s also great to have the space to use electronic gaming in really good layouts. We’re finding the electronic gaming is performing well. A lot of casinos grew up in an era when you didn’t need, or couldn’t justify, using a lot of space; because we’ve opened within the new regulations, we have a lot more flexibility so we have created a number of different gaming spaces: transactional gambling in the basement, showy international theatrical in the ground floor, and high stakes and Vegas-style on the third floor, linked to the smoking terrace. We’ve also created mission control-style rigs with our electronic games, which make them much more fun. We have 20 slots, as we’re allowed, and they do as
well as you would imagine within a venue that has around 4,000 customers a day. We’d obviously like more of them; it is a travesty that we have the environment that is acknowledged by the government as the safest place to gamble, yet people have to gamble in slot machines in far less suitable high street locations where there is less control and less player protection.
CI: Do you have a player’s club? If so, how many
have signed up? ST: Tens of thousands have signed up, but it is still
in its infancy and is developing all the time. One thing I under-estimated with the casino is the enormity of it. We’re doing well, we’re getting great admissions, fabulous drop, the bars are doing well – but we can see great potential to develop it much further, and with the loyalty system we know we can double the number of people in it and drive them
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much harder through the CRM; that’s an area where we have great scope and potential to drive the business much further.
CI: You launched the web site before you opened the casino, didn’t you? ST: Not quite. We had a relationship with a company called Purple Lounge. They were not quite as strong financially as they claimed to be, so we pulled back from them and did a deal with Microgaming’s subsidiary Betway and PokerStars and in a way the delay worked quite well. By having to delay online until we were open, it meant those partners could see how special this place is, hence we were able to get PokerStars as a partner for the live poker lounge, and Microgaming through Betway to do the online gaming. It means we have two of the
The smoking terrace
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