Articles

Developing the Casino Marketing Plan

Posted on May 16, 2001

The phenomenon of casino development in the United States is a fairly recent trend. Outside the jurisdictions of Nevada and Atlantic City, casinos have existed for less than a decade. The initial success of riverboat. dockside and Native American gaming operations in the early 1990s was predicated more on operating in monopolistic or oligopolistic environments than on sound marketing practices. Marketing plan development and implementation were not critical factors in the initial success of these nascent operations. Rather. operators were able to open facilities and implement a variety of marketing programs based more on individual managers’ personal experiences. adapt the marketing programs of Nevada operators or to simply mimic what the competition was doing rather than develop marketing strategies and action plans-based on the customers’ needs and market trends. Today casinos in many jurisdictions operate in very competitive environments. As such there is now a need for casinos to develop and implement structured marketing plans.

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Cost-Effectiveness of Substance Abuse Treatment in Casino Hotels

Posted on February 16, 1992

One of today’s business realities is the prevalence of employee substance abuse – a particularly acute problem for the hospitality industry. Merely getting rid of substance-abusing employees is, at best, a cosmetic solution. Faced with labor shortages, growing “wrongful termination” litigation, and legislative mandates that promote a drug-free workplace and prohibit employee discrimination of recovering substance abusers, employers are investing in employee-assistance programs (EAPs) that provide substance-abuse treatment and permit the employer to retain an otherwise productive employee. Like any investment, a cost-benefit analysis such as that described in this article can provide a framework for evaluating the relative advantages of various types of EAPs.

Among the more tangible benefits of treating substance abusing employees is reduced turnover and absenteeism: expensive problems that otherwise might go unchecked. As a way of presenting our cost-benefit analysis, we compare the EAPs at two casino hotels which have quite different substance-abuse programs: the Mirage, in Las Vegas, and Merv Griffin’s Resorts International Hotel-Casino, in Atlantic City. In this article, we focus only on the programs’ effects on absenteeism and turnover, recognizing full well that there are many other benefits, both tangible and intangible, that accrue when employee substance-abuse problems are addressed by managers.

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