Let it be said at the outset that $39.99 for X number of meals at (most of) Harrah’s Entertainment‘s Strip buffets — up from $29.99 — is still one heckuva deal. If you can manage, say, breakfast, lunch and two dinners in a 24-hour period, that’s $10 per buffet. Try getting that price anywhere else in town and a meal you can stomach.
Harrah’s, it will be remembered, rolled out its “Buffet of Buffets” (henceforth “BoB”) on April 12 … and it lasted all of 16 days. During that time it was insanely successful, too much so for its own good. Last Wednesday morning, Harrah’s tiptoed out a $10 price increase, mainly via Twitter. However, the Tweeting right hand of Harrah’s marketing didn’t know what the left was doing. At approximately 9:30 that same morning, yours truly saw a mobile billboard — right in front of Paris-Las Vegas — still promulgating the suddenly obsolete $29.99 price.
Although Harrah’s reserved the right (in miniscule print) to change prices without notice, to roll out the BoB with great fanfare and then slap on a 33% price increase while most of Vegas slept is what some folks (well, me anyway) would call “bait and switch.” Especially when the original price was still being touted hither and yon. This betokens a decision made and executed in haste.
Harrah’s official explanation is that BoB was too popular. That’s no exaggeration: “to ensure that our guests receive the level of service they expect and deserve, we adjusted the price to better manage the demand for the Buffet of Buffets pass.” (Translation: “Response to our promo was so good we’ve got too make it available to fewer people.”)
I’m calling total B.S. on that. True, I received eyewitness reports of ridiculously long buffet lines Sunday-Monday, when a massive, weekend hair-and-beauty convention was winding down. But queues for dinner at Planet Hollywood (Tuesday night) and breakfast at Paris LV (Wednesday morning) were shorter than one routinely experiences at M Resort‘s buffet (best in town, IMO). Yesterday’s lunch line at The Rio was practically nonexistent, with many an empty table to be seen, and it took but 25 minutes to get seated during the dinner rush at Harrah’s Las Vegas (above) last night. That might sound like a lot of time but, by Vegas standards, it’s not.
Save for a soup Nazi at Planet Ho, service was perfectly fine. (Hint to Harrah’s: If you’re throwing a big buffet bash like this one, you might consider laying on extra food- and waitstaff, rather than implicitly blaming BoB customers for causing you to have [allegedly] degraded service.)
Harrah’s LV, despite being one of the older buffets, has an interesting and (theoretically) time-saving device whereby you order your beverage at the cash register, rather than waiting until after you’ve been seated. This efficiency measure, in our case, worked out better in notion than practice but it’s something other properties should adopt.
The bottom line of the BoB debacle (way to generate negative word of mouth, Harrah’s!) is literally the bottom line. The BoB was not only too good to last — it was probably too good to be profitable. LVA‘s Anthony Curtis runs the BoB numbers in the May issue of the Advisor and let’s just say the theoretical value was off the charts.
Harrah’s high pajandrums like to congratulate themselves for being the smartest guys in the room. But if Anthony could figure out off the top of his head what Loveman, Halkyard, etc., could not then I’d have to say the Harrah’s braintrust really tripped over its shoelaces this time.
