DUETTO
because when you’re a new player in the market, you first need to have a common customer. Then, once you have the customer, you can interface with the player tracking system. We work with them and build the interface. There are simply some we haven’t worked with because we don’t have a common customer yet. Interfacing with a player tracking system is really not a hard job because all you are doing is extracting patron numbers and then values of different patrons in a very anonymous fashion. There is nothing that we have to push back to the player tracking system, because the decision gets pushed back to the property management system and the reservation management system of the property because that’s where the reservation for the room is taken.
CI: So GameChanger strikes a balance between finding best value for the customer, and best value for the customer? That is, both the casino, and the end user - because it’s not about finding the highest price, it’s finding the RIGHT price based on not just room demand overall, but also what the customer will spend during their visit… MB: Correct, but also our software is very agnostic in the sense that it optimises for the theoretical profit of the patron. Take a resort in Vegas: The constraint in all of the resorts is never the casino floor. You’re never really in a situation where you have more gamblers than slot machines or table games. The real constraint for all of these resorts is the hotel; you will have some nights when the hotel is not full, and some when you have more people than rooms to accommodate. Especially on those nights you have to make a decision on who you let into those rooms. You have competing factors because on one side you have people paying a high room rate, and on another you have players where you know how much they gamble, and you have other people where you know what they spend on other areas of the resort and all of that good stuff. It’s a pretty complex situation because you are trying to give the right room to the patron that allows you to bring the best theoretical profit for that particular stay throughout the entire resort. You are basically using
the room component – which is really your constraint – to fill the place with the best patrons that will spend the most money throughout their stay in the resort. You’re not just optimising the room rate, you are optimising the revenue and profit flow throughout the resort, which happens when people implement our system. Instead of just seeing an uptake in cash revenue in the hotel they see better quality spend in every outlet, including gaming, throughout the resort.
CI: How do you make money from it? MB: We charge a fixed amount based on the
number of rooms in the resort per month. It’s a subscription service; our system completely sits on the cloud so we are hosting in the Amazon Cloud. Whenever we enter into a contract with any hotel or casino, we charge based on the number of rooms. There is nothing up-front for them to pay, they don’t have to do a big capital investment for a new system, no IT spend, nothing to buy server-wise or to maintain. They pay their subscription, we come in, turn on the interface, and they can access our system from any device as long as they have a browser and internet connection. The hard part for us is to get operators to change
the way they think about pricing their resort. They may have been doing things the same way for the past 20 or 30 years, and they may be resistant to change; in order to achieve success with our system you have to change the way your hosts think, your staff thinks - there is some change management that comes with the system, which is why the way I describe it is that we don’t sell the use of the software, we also sell a new discipline. You have to embrace the new discipline of revenue strategy. It requires human skills and interaction; some people are ready for it, some people need convincing.
CI: Is the product available internationally? MB: Yes. The company has recently opened offices in London and Singapore, so Europe and Asia are part of our expansion plans. The product is already ready for multi-language and multi-currency.
APRIL 2015 31
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