The Hollywood Casino Columbus is the top performing of Ohio’s four casinos. But its numbers aren’t as high as some Ohio racinos.
The casino, owned by Penn National Gaming, opened 4 ½ years ago, the last of the four casinos authorized by voters to open. Besides its three casino resort competitors, it must also compete against seven “racinos” that offer video lottery terminals.
The casino’s success is partially attributable to aggressive promotions and entertainment offerings that have brought in new customers.
And there have been a lot of them. The casino hosted 2.9 million visitors last year, about 8,000 per day. For every month so far this year the Hollywood Columbus has led in revenue. Last year it led in nine out of 12 months.
The casino has a very visible location in Columbus’s West Side, but in an area of the city that wasn’t normally visited much before the casino opened.
General Manager Himbert Sinopoli told the Columbus Dispatch “We often get comments even today from people who haven’t been to the casino before, or who say they haven’t been to this area in years.”
According to David G. Schwartz, director for the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, access plays an important part in attracting customers.
Penn National President Jay A. Snowden attributed success to the casino’s knowledge of the market. “We think Columbus is going to be a growth market for us for a long, long time,” he told stockholders last week.
As good as its numbers are, some of the racinos are breathing down the Hollywood Casino Columbus’s neck. The Eldorado Scioto Downs, in the city’s South Side, posted $149.7 million to the Hollywood Casino’s $213.5 million, but its growth rate was up 3 percent from 2015, compared to 1.5 percent for the Hollywood. Moreover, the Hard Rock Rocksino in Northfield Park beat the Hollywood in total annual revenue: $225.1 million.
The Hard Rock is diversifying its appeal and is booking top tier music acts such as Train, Rod Stewart and James Taylor.
The Hollywood Columbus isn’t lagging in this department. To appeal to the Asian market and young people it has added an Asian noodle bar to an existing sports bar, fine dining and buffet. It is also booking more convention and business events. And, like the Hard Rock, it is booking more entertainment offerings, such as boxing and bands such as Grand Funk Railroad and Eddie Money.
This is keeping with the trend among casinos nationwide, where the meme is to provide a good time, which coincidentally includes gaming. As Jay Masurekar, in charge of gaming and travel investment banking at KeyBanc Capital Markets in Cleveland told the Dispatch, “Only a third of revenue on the Las Vegas Strip now comes from gaming.”
He advised watching for the trend, already popular in Las Vegas, and popular among millennials, of electronic gaming tables, which are cheaper to operate because they don’t require dealers. That allows millennials, who are inseparable from their Smartphones, to continue to use them and play.
The Hollywood Casino plans to add a hotel to further widen its appeal, although it hasn’t yet announced a schedule for one.
