The Best Guest
Finding the true value of a customer means recognizing all he or she spends — by using the data that ’ s already there By Frank Legato
Casino operators have long known their best customers . Casino industry hoteliers , not so much . Marketing professionals in the slot department and , to a lesser extent , the pit , have relied on data for decades to determine who their most valuable customers are , what they like , and how to transform all that information into repeat business through comps .
It ’ s only been a relatively recent phenomenon that the hospitality side of the industry has sought a similar view of its customers . In an era that has seen hotel , dining , spas and other non-gaming amenities come to dominate revenues for the large Las Vegas Strip casino resorts , technology is catching up with the hotel side of the industry in the form of software and systems that mine data from every corner of a resort .
The result is a complete picture of where in a resort a given customer is spending money , and how much . It is information used to guide decisions on room pricing , marketing offers and , combined and integrated with the data from the casino loyalty clubs , to get the best return on marketing dollars .
Casino resorts were not run efficiently when there were separate systems for the hotel and casino , comments Marco Benvenuti , co-founder and chief marketing and strategy officer for Duetto , a software and consulting firm that supplies revenue enhancement solutions for combined casino resort operations . “ Basically , you had two databases , one for casino players — which , by the way , got all the attention of the marketing resources — and another for non-casino customers ,” says Benvenuti , who co-founded Duetto after creating a combined revenue management system at Wynn Resorts .
Traditionally , while there was a marketer in charge of interpreting data from non-gaming revenue streams , “ it was a very disjointed effort ,” says Benvenuti .
“ For example , you would say , ‘ We have a customer that always comes to this spot and spends all his money ; let ’ s do this for them . It was very ad-hoc .” At Wynn Resorts , Benvenuti spent just over a year as IT director before being named executive director of enterprise strategy , charged with creating an ecosystem for managing all revenue streams . “ When I took over , I wanted to join both databases together into one database ,” he recalls . “ I said , ‘ Look , the value of a dollar is the value of a dollar .’ So now , we can create all the assumptions we want on the profitability of these revenue streams .”
Benvenuti says he dedicated his company to a “ more cultural effort ” to
view data from all revenue streams . “ We looked at the true enterprise lifetime profitability of each customer that we had in the database , regardless of whether they were on the casino side or on the non-casino side .”
Luke Pfeifer , director of product management for Agilysys , another hospitality solutions provider that works with the casino industry , followed a similar path from hospitality to gaming . Pfeifer says he joined Agilysys after using the supplier ’ s software suite during his years in hotel and resort management .
He says he was drawn to gaming because casino resorts face similar problems in managing data to what he experienced in resorts . “ What I just found fascinating was how the non-gaming spend at casino resorts was becoming more of an important focal point ,” he says . “ I knew that would be something in which Agilysys would help lead the charge , working with products I already knew , working in an industry I already knew , but also being able to touch the casino market and casino industry .”
“ The industry has recognized that a dollar in the bank is a dollar in the bank regardless of where on property it was spent ,” agrees Dan Skodol , vice president of revenue analytics for the Rainmaker Group , another firm providing revenue management solutions to the casino resort industry . “ As revenue from non-gaming attractions overtakes that of gaming , the concept of total guest value is more important than ever .
“ Without a complete view of customer worth , important marketing and hotel yielding decisions quickly become suboptimal .”
Finding the Right Offers
Solutions providers in revenue management all have one overriding principle : know your customer .
For Duetto , it ’ s through the GameChanger suite , with tools like the Find My Rate app , which draws on prior customer spend data to determine a rate that is right for the customer and the resort .
Casinos can leverage Duetto ’ s solutions to forecast demand for each of their segments and yield group and transient rooms at the right price with the right comp criteria and reinvestment rates .
Duetto ’ s GameChanger suite is a modern and finely tuned version of the type of combined system Benvenuti created at Wynn . “ Back then , we created what they called Wynn Private Access , a kind of secret gear to the
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