Las Vegas losing ground to online casinos, reservations

Indeed, the very title of the press release – “Casino attendance down, but gambling still a jackpot of entertainment” – reads like good news. Live Casino Direct will save you a bit of time, though, and skip to the good bit, namely a quote from Mintel senior analyst Billy Hulkower (don’t make him angry; you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry): “This shift [away from land-based casinos] has been gradual, which suggests that this is not a result of the recession. Casinos may be losing audience to the increasingly compelling entertainment offerings in the home; such as HDTV, high-end video game systems and the Internet, including Internet gambling.”

Other key statistics from Mintel include the following.

•  “Despite online gambling being illegal in the US” (key phrase there, eh?), a whopping one in eight (12%) of American adults have visited an online casino, gambling site or virtual poker room in the past year.

•  “Only” 30% of adults visited a casino in the past year, representing a decrease from 35% in 2001.

•  Attendance at casinos is down 14% since 2001.

•  Of those visiting casinos, outlets on reservation land were actually more popular than those of Las Vegas’;  27% of the casino-going poll respondents stated that they’d visited a reservation casino, with 24% having visited Sin City and another 12% to Atlantic City.

•  With 56% answering positively, “adults aged 25-34 were most likely to visit a casino in the past year.”

•  The average visit to a casino resulted in a reported win/loss of +/-$330. Men worked within a range of +/-$501, while women played to about +/-$140.

•  76% of those casino-going poll respondents claim to set a budget for casino visits and 55% “expect to lose when they gamble, but are just doing it for fun.”

•  About 20% of gambling respondents claim that they usually win.

LCD clearly doesn’t know enough of that particular 20%, that’s for sure...