As part of a third quarter conference call for investors, Keith Smith, president and CEO of Boyd Gaming Corporation, said still shuttered Downtown Las Vegas hotel casinos, Main Street Station, Eastside Cannery and Eldorado won’t reopen until sometime in 2021.
Boyd stayed afloat during the pandemic thanks to marketing cuts and reductions in staff, Smith said.
“We are proud of our team’s ability to successfully execute our strategy and are committed to sustaining a more efficient and profitable operating model into the future,” he said.
The promotional reductions will probably be around awhile. Staff cutbacks will be the new normal moving forward.
“We view a lot of the changes that have taken place as permanent in nature,” Smith said.
Boyd’s Las Vegas locals’ casinos had been a strength for the company after the slow start to the quarter. Locals produced $171 million in revenue, a decrease of 20 percent compared to the third quarter of 2019, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
But the Downtown casinos generated only $17.5 million over the period, a drop of 71 percent year over year. Boyd blamed the struggles to “significant travel restrictions in Hawaii and overall declines in Las Vegas visitation.”
That said, the Downtown portfolio represents a small portion of the overall company.
Boyd Gaming got a financial lift from its partnership with FanDuel Group, launching mobile betting platforms in Illinois and Iowa and “expanding our digital reach to more than 30 million adults nationwide,” the company said.
Boyd brought in $652.2 million during the quarter compared with $819.6 million during the same period last year, according to its earnings report.
