VEGAS INC Magazine - Latest Las Vegas business news, features and commentaries about gaming, tourism, real estate and more
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VEGAS INC leila navidi GAMBLING MAN: Bo Bernhard, executive director of UNLV's International Gaming Institute, stands on campus at the Stan Fulton Building. Bernhard is a professor of sociology and hotel management who specializes in gambling. periphery that aren't nearly as important. So this idea that gambling is this one thing and that the gaming industry is singular, you take one walk across a casino floor in Macau and you're disabused of that notion very quickly. This has important implications for researchers like me, social scientists who study gambling. How can we really say that what drives gambling is X or what drives problem gambling is Y without paying attention to culture and the anthropology differences? Having said that, that's less true than it used to be. You're seeing a convergence between the Las Vegas casino floor and the Macau casino floor. Part of this, of course, is that Las Vegas casinos businesses have opened up shop there. I'm struck by greater slot activity. I'm also struck by the degree to which there's a slow but sure Las Vegasization of the floor. That goes for the embrace of retail and the other amenities as well: the massive convention center at the Venetian Macau, the entertainment, the food and beverage. What about Singapore? Singapore is different because it's a duopoly. One of the things that the Singapore government did early on was said they wanted to see something iconic, something that the world has never seen before. In Macau, you see a mini-me ver| 15 APRIL 2013 20130415_VI01_F.indd 21 | sion of Wynn Las Vegas. You don't see that in Singapore. What you see are two truly iconic creations that are striking and unlike anything the gaming industry has produced on the planet. I think that was very intelligent on Singapore's part. Singapore could have gone with the fourth or fifth best submissions and still had something the gaming industry hasn't seen anywhere before. You had star architects coming on board for the first time, names that wouldn't dare be associated with the gaming industry a generation ago. James Cameron was involved in one of the submissions. The Pompidou Museum in France was affiliated. France is a place that cares about its high culture. And yet Singapore was able to pull that off. They coined the phrase "integrated resort." One of the funny things that you see now is how many places around the world invoke the Singapore model when talking about the possibility of bringing in resorts of their own. Jamaica is looking at expanded hotel-casino offerings and you heard in the policy debates, "We want to follow the Singapore model." You'd be hard pressed to find two countries further apart on one form of sin – marijuana policy – and on drug policy; even Jamaica is saying now that they want to be like squeaky-clean Singapore. Singapore has demonstrated that results can still be very profitable despite heavy government involvement. Macau recently imposed a partial smoking ban in casinos. Will that impact gaming revenue? I don't think so. For one thing, it's only certain parts of the floor. For another, markets are remarkably resilient. The famous case in gaming was the smoking ban in the Australian club marketplace. They saw a 25 percent reduction in gaming revenues overnight. But people get used to the new status quo relatively quickly and the revenues have returned. We adjust to the new normal. We've done so with restaurants. We've done so in a wide variety of spaces. While much of the gaming industry is afraid of this, the longer-term impact, I suspect, is much less noticeable. Will we ever have a smoking ban in Nevada casinos? I don't know. Las Vegas is a place where people expect to engage in certain types of behaviors, so I think we're still a long way off from that. And I really don't think that Las Vegas is going to be looking to Macau for policy advice in the gaming sphere any time soon. How is Nevada's gaming and tourism economy doing? Are we out of the reces- sion? It does feel like we're in the great thaw now. What was notable to somebody like me was that even in the Great Recession, you'd walk the floor and you'd think, "What recession? This place is packed." And of course, what was happening was that they were still coming, but they weren't spending the amount of money they were before. So that's obviously the metric we're going to focus on. On the one hand, it was interesting that there was still a buzz at the ground level. At the corporate, there was massive near panic. But the Strip was still packed. The institute will host the 15th International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking at Caesars Palace in May. What will take place? We're co-hosting it with UNR. This is the event that since 1974 has been the place where the world's gambling and commercial gaming intellectuals gather to debate the issues of the day. They invite everyone from card counters to the most brilliant gaming mathematicians to gaming economists to behavioral scientists to industry experts to regulators. It's multidisciplinary in the best sense. We already have more than 200 papers that are going to be presented there from six continents. This is a place where ideas really come to fruition. 21 4/11/13 3:04:15 PM