So, the big question for gamblers is will casinos be safe to enter after the pandemic? The future isn’t totally known as the first important measure is business recovered given the massive hit that they all took for near a year. Now, casinos in some countries are open, some only half-full due to the local measures.
We take a look at the future post-pandemic world of casinos to see if this is indeed an opportunity for casinos to re-think their appeal and how players are able to engage with their games with total peace of mind.
We went and visited a number of open local casinos to help us gauge where business is going and where it could potentially fail.
Impact of SARs-CoV-2
Businesses across the world took a huge knock during the pandemic, especially smaller business ventures. You would think that industries like casinos would be self-sufficient and wealthy enough to survive but getting through it is just half the battle. After the pandemic, businesses still need to be able to attract the attention of customers again. Will the moto of hands, face, space be in the back of people’s minds when they integrate back into society once again?
For some, the mental scars will be a reality, whilst some will be able to brush this off with ease. How will businesses cater to the public that are now aware that this virus may be around for a lot longer still?
The boom in online casino interest
Well, in a little under a month since the World Health Organization announce that this Covid-19 was indeed a pandemic, one of the biggest booms in the online field was amongst the casinos. Every one of them saw a hike in gaming and membership. It wasn’t just Amazon and Jeff Bezos looking to get rich during the lockdown.
We talked with Ingerlise Dalen, Editor-in-Chief at NorskOnline Casino which is Norway’s largest comparison site to discuss the surge of Norwegian players that took to gambling once lockdown happened.
“The spike in membership came in April 2020, prior to that we were recording moderate to high engagement on the site but people at that point were not registering with the casinos. It was perhaps during the third week of April that it was evident that players in Norway saw gambling as a means of financial support given that most of the population had to stop working. Our service is there to provide players with the best-licensed casinos in Norway and provide exclusive bonuses for when they register. We are able to track the movements of users on our site and to which casino they register with. Our commission is made based on any first deposits made within the casino. So, we have a lot of data to show that certainly by May the membership numbers within Norway’s top online casinos more than doubled from what the 2018/2019 figures showed.”
For the online industry, it would appear there is going to be no ill-effect from the pandemic, even once society is back to its normal self.
Visiting casinos in a new normal way
When visiting the land-based casinos to see what had changed, there was a sense of nerves, being germophobic, I went armed with gloves and my own hand sanitizer. At the entrance the sign indicated to members that social distancing must be kept, masks worn at all times, and that no smoking was permitted even in the smoking area. Before stepping into the foyer of the casino, temperatures are checked, and hands sanitized.
The inside of the casino was repositioned with slot machines separated by 3 meters, tables for the poker, blackjack, and roulette were also moved to accommodate more floor space.
Signs were placed so that only 1 person could be on the slots and table chairs were limited to 5, making 6 at the table with the dealer in total.
At the table, Perspex sheets were installed to almost cage the dealer into one spot and there were further see-through walls of Perspex to separate the players at the table. Did this feel safe? Well, at first it just felt odd, if this was how it was to be all the time going forward, vaccine or no vaccine, health card or no health card, this is not how I’d want the experience to be. Nothing is relaxed about this; nothing is appealing about it.
The casino had closed the buffet service down and presented minimal staff, a further disappointment to see that despite a restart, it was very much a case of jumpstarting it, rather than having something smoothly continue from where it left off.
In this brief experience, you can sense that this makes no sense. Casinos are now obsolete; it may have been a bad day to visit but even the staff looked unsure of why they were even there. Do they have a future? Sure, but major adaption is needed to compete with the services that players get from online casinos. A start would be for land-based sites to get online and to integrate services. Online casinos offer bonuses to players, land casinos should be doing the same. Obviously more needs to be done on an epic scale for all sites to be up to date. Despite, the negativity, casinos should remain, even if they appear to be nostalgic amusement parks now, there is a real opportunity still, a long way down the line. Casinos are easily able to incorporate new software and technology. They can, like amusement games put players into VR gaming experiences, played within safe VR areas. Perhaps in a 100-years from now, these establishments will be packed with holographic games that help right the casinos of table and cards.
A new normal
To be fair, we are a long way off from discovering this, perhaps it is something that will just naturally evolve. This may just be a blip in the grander scheme of things, so we are testing the water and seeing if it’s safe to swim yet, despite not being really sure on how to swim to survive. It is all a bit new, but this very much feels like it does not need to be this way. Those content blissfully ignorant days of 2019 could return if we were collective in our thinking, but we are not and casinos are, unfortunately, going to be victims themselves because of what lockdown did to the world of high street business.
If there is to be a new normal within the casinos, we have near us, then it is the casinos that have to dramatically change for them to survive as a business and for us to care enough as a customer to visit, because right now, everything we need is online, where it is safe and instantly accessible.
