Helped by a wee bit of late-August slot revenue, Nevada posted a 7% revenue gain this month, for a $959 haul. The Strip performed spectacularly, up 13%, and Downtown edged 2% higher. Lake Tahoe vaulted 23% but Reno fell off 2%. Nor did Laughlin (-5%) or Mesquite (-2% and with 100% less Randy Black) fare especially well. On the Las Vegas Strip, baccarat win rose 49%, with the house playing very lucky, as baccarat drop was but 8% higher. Warned casino analyst Steven Wieczynski, “The positive baccarat volume performance was offset by generally underwhelming slot volumes.” Blackjack also provided a $29 million boost and $337 million was bet on sports, with casinos holding 9%. North Las Vegas saw gambling revenues increase 14%, but the Boulder Strip was flat.
MGM Resorts International missed analyst expectations and posted a modest loss of $32 million (“modest” by their standards, not yours or mine). Revenue was up 9% overall and 13% in MGM’s casinos. Leading the pack was MGM Grand Paradise, in Macao, with a 22% gain. Slowish recovery on the Strip — revenue per available room rose 3% — held the overall company back. Strip occupancy nudged 1% upward, to 91.5% — except at Circus Circus and the various CityCenter hotels. It’s also 88% of the way toward filling its quota of convention bookings for 2014. Most of the loss was a writeoff of real estate in Jean and Sloan: One of J. Terrence Lanni‘s crazier legacies, having sought to build employee housing in the middle of the desert, in anticipation of a second airport being built out there. Even CityCenter continues to post incremental improvements, so the good news outweighed the bad.
The headline item on this story seems negative: Less spending per visitor in Macao. But the dark lining is surrounded by a silver cloud. Macanese tourism is encompassing a wider swath of China, not simply Guangdong Province. Also, conference attendance has risen 67%. All of this ought to yield higher mass-market play, music to the ears of operators like Las Vegas Sands who have firmly planted themselves in that niche.
