The Asia-centric strategy pursued by Las Vegas’ Lucky Dragon Hotel & Casino appears to be paying off as the city’s newest gambling palace prepares to add more high-limit tables and introduce a Macau-style rolling chip program.
Less than four months after the privately owned 203-room resort opened just off the Strip on Sahara Avenue, a major makeover is under way, said Chief Operating Officer David Jacoby.
“We find that we’re doing more business out of the higher-end players than we had originally anticipated. That has sparked some increased focus on making sure we dedicate enough of our resources to that type of play.”
As part of the redesign, Pearl Ocean, one of the property’s two full-service restaurants, will move from the second floor to the first to create additional space for the private baccarat salons that Asian high rollers?most of them Chinese?demand.
Dragon’s Alley, a self-service eatery just off the main casino floor, has already closed to provide extra space as part of the makeover. It will eventually reopen as a small noodle bar.
Lucky Dragon was built from the ground up to attract Asian gamblers? the only resort in Las Vegas, or in the United States, for that matter, to favor Chinese over English in its signage, to emphasize multilingual staff and to feature a feng shui-friendly interior throughout.
“Chinese is by far the dominant language or demographic of our customers,” said Vice President of Marketing Jordan Seager.
That said, the casino does attempt to cater to people from a wide variety of Asian cultures. When customers sign up for the casino loyalty program, as an example, they’re asked if they prefer Tagalog, Korean, Vietnamese or other Asian languages for communications.
Testifying before the Nevada Gaming Control Board in October, General Manager Matthew Harkness said the plan was to market to domestic Asian customers in Las Vegas and California and also in the Pacific Northwest.
Jacoby has described this group as mostly middle-class customers and mostly West Coast residents of Asian ancestry rather than people who live overseas.
“We are still getting that mid-range player that we intended to focus on,” he said. “They’re definitely still coming.”
If there has been one surprise, it’s been how successful the VIP market has been, Seager said.
“We have had a much stronger VIP segment than what we anticipated and that affects obviously our overall business. That’s why we have expanded the VIP segment (of the casino floor) specifically because our current VIP business has a need for the additional area. If we had anticipated that six months prior we might have changed that from the beginning, but that’s not a bad thing to have happen.”
The introduction of a rolling-chip program bears this out, although the Lucky Dragon version appears to differ from Macau’s junket-based credit system and uses the non-negotiable chips employed by the system to deliver the customary loss rebates and incentives casinos grant VIPs in exchange for their play.
Steve Cyr, longtime Las Vegas casino VIP host and author of a book about VIP gaming titled “Whale Hunt in the Desert,” said few Vegas casinos have adopted the rolling-chip approach.
“There are a couple of places doing it,” Cyr said. “For example, the Rio is doing it, but on a very limited basis. They (Lucky Dragon) are the leader.”
