Pandemic and Casinos
It has been a long time since i wrote my article on how the reopening of Casinos should be planned. Even though I was more thinking from a scientific aspect of what was read and the constant fear of the unseen enemy I was in shock of surprise in how the country reacted to the Pandemic. At the time of writing this article, vaccines are out but this virus is still on his journey and we are not even out of the first wave.
It felt people just did not feel like they need to be in lock down. The maximum check the casinos did was a temperature check and contact tracing was very minimal. The social distancing technology had interest but some just went with manual way of removing chairs from machine so that they can maintain safe distance. Few properties did choose manual intervention of locking the games. For properties that did not leave the game locked players were standing and playing. It was kind of total joke. Across the borders government oversight made some properties inoperable.
No body was ever able to make any sense of what was going on and few operators were feeling very comfortable that they did not have to give the promotions for attracting the players to come to the property in the middle of the pandemic. Players were still coming through the doors. It can be assumed that people were tired of all the lockdowns, politics and what not and they wanted to move on. I think beating the virus, seems not a priority. It was mainly keeping the business open. Not sure which data science model could have predicted such scenarios.
However spirit of the human mind never ceases to amuse. Things that were considered which cannot be done remote are getting done with few improvisations. There were many installs that happened across the domestic casinos which were earlier thought time consuming or slow. It just certified cliches that necessity is the mother of invention. Overall the importance of digital has become more and more evident.
Also the ones who are making the real changes are the ones who have invested in people and technology. The more tools the business is given to improve the bottom line, those properties beat the competition. The Pie is becoming smaller and hence the ones with the best tools and know how of using the tool would benefit from the intense competition.
Like every other industry the outlook is now towards the path of recovery. With such a huge spending stimulus to prop up the economy and political shift you can only wait and watch. The stock markets behaved oddly in the pandemic. All we can hope is that the new year brings stability to proceedings and government executes a speedy delivery of vaccines.
Effectively one of challenges that did see is with so many lay offs and furloughs organizations did see that having key employees trained well keeps the competitive advantage. Motivated workforce who believed and bought into common goal of beating the pandemic truly made the difference in last year. Let us hope the world recovers and able to beat this pandemic.