Technology Advances Casino Loyalty Programs
Beyond complimentary food, drinks, rooms, airline ticket reimbursements, loss rebates and group discounts, the best of casino "rewards programs" have become more pervasive, motivating and sophisticated. Advances in information technology have helped capture data in real time, deliver incentives faster and segment the gamer market in dozens of ways.
The most important advance so far has been automating the job of tracking player activity. At its crudest, this used to be done by pit bosses and clerks who observed the bets laid and losses incurred by known big spenders, jotted these down with pen and paper and consolidated them at the end of the shift to see if the "high roller" was already entitled to some comp or other. In fact, this is still the norm in most casinos worldwide
Manual methods made sense at a time when casinos cared only about players with capital running to seven figures or more. The faces were easy to spot and most such "V.I.P.'s" tended to stay put at high-stakes tables of their favorite card game anyway.
With rapid expansion and more intense competition - there are now 40 casinos in Las Vegas and 22 in Macao, for instance - came the need to cater to the mass market of habitual or repeat patrons. Catering to playing capital of just a few thousand dollars made sense considering that around 50 million Americans take their poker seriously and many more come to try their luck at the slots.
The interim upgrade involved constructing local area or wide-area networks (LAN/WAN) linking computer terminals at tables where hundreds of dollars changed hands with every deal. Pit bosses or assistant dealers still had to know the big spender by name but now, they only had to enter amounts bet or lost on the terminal. Centralized servers took care of the cumulative totals and instantly reporting what comps players were already entitled to.
But that still left players at dollar, multi-line or hundred-dollar slot machines out in the cold. The adoption of magnetic-strip cards with variable credit amounts encoded helped. At least, casino tellers could manually capture the player's name when they bought and cashed the card.
The real breakthrough came when RFID chips became small and cheap enough to deploy by the hundreds of thousands, as plastic tags hardly thicker than a credit card and handed out to slot machine and table game players alike. Each chip could be encoded with personal information and paid-up playing capital. More important still, the cards could record bets placed and cumulative net win or loss.
On the hardware side, slot machines became intelligent terminals. Each had a card reader slot in front and was linked to the casino LAN/WAN.
Table games could also be automated with the addition of concealed RFID sensors that silently recorded the players' identities and, with the adoption of RFID-enabled chips, the amounts they bet, won or lost.
For the first time, therefore, Joe Average could earn loyalty points for all tracked slot, table, keno, poker, bingo, race track and race/sports betting.
The raw computing power available in IBM AS400 minicomputers or multi-server hubs enabled casinos to offer more loyalty points by game type (more for high-stakes tables and No Limit Texas Hold 'Em, for instance), more time spent at the tables, and by gross or average bets placed.
The advent of magstripe or RFID cards that could contain personal information and progress of play represented a quantum leap for casinos eager to target repeat business from a broader market besides "high rollers". Being able to track slot machine play was an important advance but placing sensors in gaming tables broadened the applicability of any rewards program.