Online gambling not taking business away from land casinos, says Caesars
News on 9 Apr 2014
News on 9 Apr 2014
Fears among land gambling operators that online gambling represents a threat to their businesses have again been shown to be groundless following a recent Caesars Entertainment study of its online gamblers in the nascent New Jersey market.
Designed primarily to establish from which cities and towns gamblers were accessing the online services, the study also showed that most gamblers were not being ‘stolen’ from land-based casinos, and are not the same clientele who frequent the traditional casino resorts.
Caesars spokesman Seth Palansky told the Press of Atlantic City Tuesday that the company does not believe gamblers logging on to the online sites are staying home to have a flutter instead of traveling to Atlantic City.
“We’re finding very similar patterns as other companies. The people online are people that haven’t visited us in a while or are new players altogether,” Palansky said. “We’re not seeing cannibalization.”
His conclusions have previously been reached by other prominent land gambling executives, most recently from the Borgata, which found that 85 percent of its online players have not had rated play at the land casino in two years .
The Press of Atlantic City recalls that earlier this year the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming, Hospitality and Tourism at Richard Stockton College conducted a poll that showed that 2.5 percent of New Jersey gamblers have gone online to gamble since the practice became legal in November. Seven percent said they intend to gamble online in the coming year.
In the Caesars study many online gamblers are accessing the websites from locations that are just an hour’s drive from the land operations, but they are not the same clientele who usually visit the land casinos.
Toms River in Ocean County has the largest number of online gamblers logging in to Caesars Interactive Entertainment’s websites, with Jersey City, Cherry Hill in Camden County, Brick in Ocean County and Hoboken close behind.
“What’s interesting is there was no extra attention paid to any of these markets,” Palansky said. “This is only our first 100 days in the market. We really need year over year [statistics] to get reliable enough data to take advantage of this more.”
