GGB Magazine Podcast

Cashless payments have been on a roll since the beginning of the pandemic. Not only are people more used to electronic transactions, they also are hoping to avoid contact with cash or devices that used to be the only way to make a payment. Jacob Lanning returned to IGT last year to lend his expertise in developing the IGT Resort Wallet, which allows customers at a casino resort to easily load money onto slot machines, purchase chips at table games or many any transaction across the resort without any physical contact with a person or device. He spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros from his home office in Las Vegas in March.

The Plaza Hotel Casino in Downtown Las Vegas is 50 years old this year. The property was built on the site of the former Las Vegas train station and was known as the Union Plaza when it first opened. It experienced a series of owners, including the legendary Jackie Gaughan, who owned most of Downtown at the time. Jonathan Jossel arrived in 2007 with the most recent owners, the Tamares Group. He’s been CEO for the last seven years and has guided the property through a major expansion, a pandemic and the rebound of the Downtown market. He spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros from Oscar’s Steakhouse in the famous dome of the Plaza in March. [https://ggbnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/igt.jpg] GGB Podcast sponsored by IGT.com [https://www.igt.com/]

The GGB Podcast sits down with Michael Facenda, the senior vice president and general manager of the Agua Caliente casino in Cathedral City, California, on the opening of the new property in the middle of the pandemic and how it has been performing since.

Matt Wilson made his name rising up through the ranks at Aristocrat Technologies. He was involved in all aspects of the company’s success at one time or another. When he was recruited to lead the gaming division of Scientific Games, he was required to honor a non-compete of nearly a year. But when he came on finally, the pandemic hit. He explains how the company handled that challenge and why it’s poised to move forward as the crisis wanes. He spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros at the Scientific Games headquarters in Las Vegas in January. GGB: You stepped into your role as the CEO of Gaming in March 2020. What kind of plans did you have before the pandemic hit, and what was the impact? Matt Wilson: I started March 2, with a dream and a bunch of aspirations, and that quickly changed. A week later, the industry started to shut down. So, not exactly how I drew it up. I think the Mike Tyson line is, “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.” And we all got punched in the mouth in a pretty profound way in 2020. Like every business, we quickly went into crisis management. We had to make a bunch of big decisions, and hopefully we got the majority of those right, and I think we’re moving in the right direction. How did you stay in touch with your clients during this time? The world’s turned pretty dramatically, I think. It used to be you had to get on a plane or a train or a car and go see a customer. Now you’ve got this rise of the video conferencing tools. It’s very easy and efficient to communicate with customers. The first thing we thought was, how do we be of service to our customers? And we came up with this idea—a thought leadership series, which was really about getting all of our customers on the line, talking about the things that mattered to them. We have a big global footprint, whether it’s Australia, or Asia, or North America or the U.K. So, we got operators from all around the globe on a call. Initially talking about social distancing, and reconfiguring floors, and those types of things, we then evolved the topics over time. We tried to be of service to customers, and bring content to them that was going to be useful for them navigating their way through the pandemic. You’re kind of getting the band back together here at Scientific Games. You’ve brought in a lot of your colleagues who you worked with at Aristocrat—Siobhan Lane, Connie James, Rich Schneider and others. I actually think it’s a new band. It’s a different band. More like a supergroup! We have superstars from all these different bands, (including) the legacy employees here that have a lineage back to Shuffle Master or Bally or WMS. And then we’re bringing some people in from the operator side, like Eileen Moore, and there’s the host of people from Aristocrat, who have been drawn to this opportunity. Rich Schneider is on the way. He’s going to lead our global R&D teams. We’ve got Ted Hase, who’s maybe one of the best designers in the industry joining. And then ultimately, at the helm, we’ve got Jamie Odell, as our chairman, and Toni Korsanos as our vice chair, who were widely regarded as the architects of Aristocrat’s success—both big believers in the intersection of strategy and culture. And then finally we’ve got Barry Cottle, who’s my boss, our CEO, and he brings a gaming perspective from Zynga and EA Sports. So, it’s kind of a melting pot of lots of different executives with lots of different perspectives. Most manufacturers have been concentrating on the established brands, rather than going out and getting the licenses that cost so much. What has your strategy been? We have a few large tent-pole brands in-house—evergreen franchises, like The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka, James Bond, Monopoly, these types of brands. Ones that really kind of cut through social consciousness. And then we have a lot of in-house proprietary brands. I think the part of the business that most suppliers are moving away from is that kind of middle-ground, these kind of second, third-tier licenses, that don’t have the same panache with players. I think it may be a consequence of the fragmentation of media. In the ’60s and ’70s, you’d have shows like M*A*S*H on TV, which 50 percent of the population would tune into. But now you’ve got Netflix with a million different offerings, and cable TV with 300 different channels, and so, the audience is fragmented across a ton of different brands. So, it’s hard to find those big tent-pole brands that reach the mass audience now. That’s a dynamic playing out in the industry. Another consequence of the pandemic has been the growth of online gaming. Scientific Games has a whole separate division, SciPlay, handling that. How do you interact with them? Jordan Levin is my peer there. He’s the CEO of the digital division. And we work kind of hand in hand. There are two parts to that market. There’s a big European piece, which is a different market structure than the U.S., where it’s all about sports betting and iCasinos, all through the land-based partners. What’s unique about Scientific Games compared to every other supplier in the industry is the breadth of the portfolio. We have table games and table game systems, electronic table games, cashless solutions. We have sports betting solutions, the best in the industry. And we have iCasino as well—a very forward position there, a content aggregator, which is the best product in the market. So, we have that kind end-to-end solution, and we’re able to package all of that, go to an operator and ask, why would you buy anything from anyone else? We’re a solution to all those issues.

When Richard Branson founded Virgin Hotels several years ago, he always intended to place a hotel in Las Vegas. That happened last year when, in cooperation with Bosworth Hospitality and investment firm Juniper Capital Partners, they purchased the former Hard Rock Hotel. The casino at Virgin Las Vegas will be run by Mohegan Gaming & Hospitality at Mohegan Sun Las Vegas, with Joe Hasson as the general manager. Hasson spoke with GGB Publisher Roger Gros in a Zoom podcast from the casino in March. GGB: It’s an exciting time to open a new property, but you’ve been through that a few times. What’s different opening this casino? Hasson: We’re excited and proud to bring the Mohegan brand of gaming to the Las Vegas Strip corridor. I feel the appropriate pressure of that—which is a good thing to feel. This is different because this is truly an integrated resort. They’ve had this opportunity in place for a long time, and they’ve brought together a bunch of great brands. In addition to Virgin, they brought in the power of the Hilton Curio database, they have AEG Presents running what will be a great entertainment and events center, and then a fabulous array of restaurant entrepreneurs who bring all the pop, pizzazz and sparkle that you can imagine all under one roof. We were very familiar with the Hard Rock casino. What will be different at the Mohegan Sun casino? You’ll find a complete re-imagination of the resort. For the casino, the Mohegan brand will bring all the popular slot games. Anything that is new, we’re going to have it. But we will also populate the floor with the old favorites, whether it be reel games or video poker-style games. We want this to feel familiar as well as new at the same time. You won’t find the infamous center bar. We’ve replaced that with the center of the casino, a combination of slots and table games. The bar has been moved to the entryway of the resort, which is essentially the lobby bar now, which also includes the ultra-lounge. I think people will enjoy it. People will find old and new at the Mohegan Sun casino. How are you going to interact with the other partners? We want this to be a seamless experience for the guests, so the operators need to have the coordination behind the scenes among all the partners. My job is to stay in close contact with those other businesses that are part of the integrated resort and to make sure we’re coordinated in such a way that the guests are comfortable and fulfilled. You’ve got multiple databases that you’re going to use—Mohegan, Virgin Hotels, the database of the former Hard Rock and the Hilton Curio. How will those folks be addressed? When I think about the power of the Mohegan database, we operate in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington state, Louisiana and now we’re operating in Canada, across from Niagara Falls. We know our guests in all those regions come to Las Vegas, and now we’ve got something great to offer them. For the former guests of Hard Rock, we’re going to reach out to them and ask them to try us again. Come visit us and let us introduce ourselves to you. We’ll place you instantly in the right tier of rewards that you were accustomed to without having to earn your way to that level. It’s a matter of respect. Lots of the former employees of the Hard Rock have returned. How is that working out? We honored whatever promises were made to the casino employees, so as general manager of the Mohegan Sun casino, I’m pleased and proud to welcome those employees back. It’s a matter of mutual respect and cooperation and the manner in which Mohegan Sun does business, and it’s the right thing to do. Very few general managers who open up new or reinvented properties have a veteran workforce on day one. I have the luxury and that honor.