Caesars Bets on Technology
Every day the 29 casinos are visited by tens of thousands of visitors. Guests that enter a Caesars/Park Place casino do not leave before they have gambled, eaten, slept, and been thoroughly entertained. Although few realize it, properties as diverse as Caesars and the Paris in Las Vegas, Atlantic City's Bally's property and Mississippi's Grand Casino Biloxi are all part of the same casino company. More than anything else, technology is the bridge uniting the widely varied properties that have been brought together in the last few years through acquisition.
While the name may be changing the commitment to technology has been more consistent. Recently, Hospitality Technology sat down with Bob Conover, chief information officer at Caesars to discuss the company's technology strategy. As Conover detailed the VoIP (Voice over Internet protocol) telephony for operational use, remote check-in for the Las Vegas properties, and a proprietary data warehouse - among a host of other technology initiatives - it was clear that Caesars has put a premium on technological innovation and had instituted the infrastructure to make the leading casino company a technology leader as well.
Standardization versus integration
One of the key challenges for Conover has been integrating multiple brands, which came together through acquisition. Less than five years old, Caesars was created as a spin-off of Hilton Hotels gaming division, which included Bally's gaming properties, and the simultaneous acquisition of Mississippi-based Grand Casinos. Since then, Park Place has acquired Caesars World and continues to open new properties at a rapid pace.
"We try to standardize our hotel financials, point of sales, back of the house and casino systems--they're our core," explains Conover. "In the acquisitions of the many different brands that we've had over the last couple of years, there were many different types of systems in those brands, so standardization and integration was really important to the ability to deploy technology across our enterprise."
Of course, uprooting systems at the acquired properties is not necessarily conducive to maintaining the smooth operation of a major casino like Caesars Las Vegas. At one point, Conover notes Park Place had at least six different casino management systems with the different brands. "Putting those together was a major initiative for the IT staff," he admits. "In standardizing our major applications, we were able to better position ourselves to react to change and it certainly provides enhanced functionality to our users, which in the end provides better services to our guests."
As Conover is quick to point out, however, standardization need not mean putting a straight jacket on the properties for technology solutions. "You have to have the flexibility to be able to provide the different markets with the functionality that they need," he insists, "but with standardization, you're able to deploy that technology and enhance that technology in a far speedier fashion than going in and doing it on an individual basis."
Changing the industry
That Caesars has put such a focus on its technology solutions should come as no surprise and represents the priorities laid down by Wallace Barr, president and chief executive officer. Like many in the casino industry, Barr has recognized that information technology has become an indispensable tool for coping with the varied local regulations that casinos must abide by in the United States. "Technology is changing the way we do business and the way our business is regulated," he recently remarked at the Southern Gaming Summit.
As Barr pointed out, not only has technology enhanced efficiency, improved security and helped strengthen the way casinos interact with guests, but it has also forced casinos to rethink business practices and organization in significant ways. At the center of these changes has been the ability to share information, within a property, enterprise-wide and even with industry competitors.
The key step for Caesars to facilitate sharing has been the implementation of a high-speed connection to all of the United States properties. Caesars has installed an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network with within its Atlantic City, Mississippi and Las Vegas clusters. Within the clusters, the network offers gigabit bandwidth from property to property and 100 megabit to the desktop. Bridging the clusters, a frame relay runs 45-megabit bandwidth across the country.
The high bandwidth allows a whole host of applications to reshape communication between the properties and from the properties to the corporate headquarters. VoIP communication, data warehousing and mining, and CRM are just of a few of the growing host of applications that flow through the network.
"We need to have a high speed network in place in order to transfer data," explains Conover. "Without the high-speed connection between the clusters and between the individual regions, we can't deploy a program like our Connection Card loyalty program. All of our properties update their actual property management systems or casino systems on a real-time basis, and that data is filtered back to our data warehouse using our high-speed network."
Caesars even uses the network to provide remote check-in at Stapleton Airport in Las Vegas for all its properties. The system, which is just being rolled out, offers real-time access to the property-management system for check-in while guests are waiting for luggage.
Reducing lines
Stapleton's remote check-in as well as in hotel check-in kiosk are part of Park Placeis strategic drive to reduce pressure at key bottlenecks while at the same time offering improved flexibility for guests and efficiency for the properties. Throughout the company flexibility is the key. Caesars developed the proprietary kiosk to allow optimum flexibility on its part.
"By having it developed internally, we're able to change it as our market changes and our marketing programs change, and provide the guests with a more pleasant experience vs. wait in lines and the old traditional way of redeeming comps," Conover insists.
The true flexibility, however comes with freeing up casino staff and reducing lines and wait times. With the remote check-in and kiosks, guests experience shorter delays, fewer lines and are ready to gamble more quickly. Needless to say, reducing lines leads to happier guests as well.
This line of thinking has also lead Caesars to develop ticket in/ticket out slot technology. One of the primary bottlenecks for casinos has been stocking slot machines with coins and paying out to winners. The system is not totally coinless, Conover points out, but gives gamblers the ability to redeem winnings without cash or waiting for machines to be refilled or winnings to be converted.
Instead of continuously feeding coins into a slot machine, a player begins by inserting currency or coins. The machine then records the play electronically. When the player is finished, he or she receives a bar-coded ticket from the machine. The player can use that ticket to play another machine or to actually take to a cashier to cash out his winnings.
"To date we have already deployed almost 16,000 ticket in/ticket out machines across the country and have this technology in all of our domestic properties in the United States," reports Conover. "By year end we should have nearly 22,000 machines using the technology in our 18 casinos across the country. That's about 60 percent of our slots."