The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma has been working with Duetto to revenue-optimize its casino resorts since 2015. The Choctaw Casinos & Resorts portfolio currently totals nearly 2,000 rooms and includes:
- Choctaw Casino & Resort Durant offers 1,616 rooms and one of the largest casino floor spaces in the world, with 7,400 slot machines and over 100 table games. The property also has 16 restaurants, a theater, six cinemas, spa, pool, and a bowling alley.
- Choctaw Casino & Resort Pocola has 118 rooms, including 10 luxury suites and two penthouse suites. The resort also offers four F&B outlets.
- Choctaw Casino & Resort Durant Grant offers 156 rooms and 23 suites, live entertainment venues, and four restaurants.
Each property attracts a predominantly local or regional market, with tourists typically driving up to two hours to visit.
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The revenue team is proud to have been Duetto trailblazers, onboarding with our revenue strategy platform in 2015. Before Duetto, there were no revenue management systems in place. The hotels were not yielding much before 2014 – working only with weekday and weekend rates.
Since 2015, the team has continued to evolve how it uses Duetto, adding Find My Rate in 2017 to better serve up personalized pricing to its regular customers.
Find My Rate is part of GameChanger Casino. It provides dynamic loyalty rates direct to guests online, or through casino hosts, front desk agents, or the call center. It also gives casinos the opportunity to upsell guests to higher-priced room categories, such as suites.
“Find My Rate has really changed the way promotions and offers are sent to guests. The tribe is convinced that you have to send mail, which is fine. But you don’t always have to guarantee guests in advance a room every single weekend. You can't yield if you are already giving everybody a free room. Find My Rate was a big change in how to deliver free rooms and what to offer them and when. Now, our loyalty members just call or go online, and they can look at their availability and offers,” said Edmund Wong, Corporate Director of Revenue Management, Choctaw Casinos & Resorts.
In 2022, Choctaw Casinos & Resorts decided to make all comp offers available online through Find My Rate, working through the booking engine and Agilysys as the PMS.
“It has been a large change in terms of how we strategize because people make decisions quicker online. It has really changed how we've approached revenue strategy because now we are continually developing it and trying to add more to it,” Wong explained.
Choctaw Casinos & Resorts has been through a real revenue evolution – moving from traditional mail promotions to enabling guests to book their comp rooms online. The changes also give the revenue team the ability to flex rates or identify the high rollers and make strategic decisions on who qualifies for a comp room and when. Personalized offers are now at the heart of their revenue strategy.
Since introducing Duetto in 2015, Choctaw Casinos & Resorts has seen continued increases in business coming through the Duetto segments, using the loyalty rates through Find My Rate.
According to Wong, up to 75% of all business comes to the resorts through this channel.
Optimizing Million Dollar Giveaways
For the summer of 2023, Choctaw Casino & Resort Durant ran a $6.6 Million Summer Giveaway campaign - the largest promotion in its history. The promotion featured three $1 million giveaway nights. Guests earned entries using their Reward Club cards and had to be staying on the property the night of the draw to stand a chance of winning.
The promotion garnered much interest among the loyalty card members, giving Wong and his team plenty of opportunities to flex rates and offers.
“Those stay dates were hard to get into and the rates were high. But even at a high rate, loyalty members could see value in staying because they might have collected multiple draw entries throughout the month,” explained Wong.
“We are yielding to the highest value person on those specific days. So, those people are already going to spend a lot, but we just have to limit who's getting a room because everybody wants to be here,” he added.
Rates on $1 million draw nights typically exceeded $700. But interest was high and so too was occupancy.
Personalized pricing through Find My Rate gives the power back to the guest because it is their decision when they stay and what is affordable. The casino may have rates at $700 on a high-demand weekend, and even with a $200 loyalty discount, this is still too high for some guests. They will look and book at a time that is priced more within their budget. The guest gets the stay they want, and the casino resort gets the highest value guests that they can achieve on any given night.
Flexing the rates enables Wong and his team to find the best conversion point for each guest.
“The nice thing about it is that the guest has choices. They get discounts based on their true value. And sometimes that discount might be higher on a weekend because guests typically play more when it's busier in the casino. So, if they come on the weekend and they are a lower value player they still get a discount that is comparable to where their value is,” Wong explained.
“You bring them on property and their spend comes along with them.”
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