Casino places winning bet on Marathon apps

18.09.2006
In a city built on winning the tourist dollar, Las Vegas casino operator Station Casinos Inc. has taken an opposite but equally lucrative route that depends heavily on its use of technology.

While glamorous palaces located on the Las Vegas Strip target high-spending out-of-towners, Station's 15 casinos -- mostly located in suburban areas miles away -- target Las Vegas' burgeoning local population, one of the fastest-growing in the U.S. in recent years. "Our customers are primarily people who work in the valley but don't want to fight their way to the Strip after work," said Steve Bastille, director of servers and desktop systems at Station.

Targeting that demographic has been fruitful -- Station topped US$1 billion in revenue for the first time last year -- and it has shaped the company's business strategy. Rather than investing in expensive gimmicks to woo and wow customers, Station placed its bet on software from Marathon Technologies Corp. to help ensure repeat business for its bread-and-butter moneymaker: slot machines.

"We are not bringing in high volumes of high rollers playing the table games like poker and blackjack. Most of our customers play the slots," Bastille said. Station's larger casinos have about 3,000 slot machines each, and the company operates about 25,000 slots in total.

These aren't the primitive mechanical beasts of yesteryear. The slots Station operates are fully computer-driven devices with cutting-edge features. For one, customers can now insert paper tickets, rather than having to lug around a huge bag of coins. At the end of play, the slot machines spit out a ticket customers can exchange for cash.

The slot machines also communicate with back-end servers to keep track of players' cumulative activity. These database-driven applications rely on players swiping their "Boarding Pass" loyalty cards before each play. The loyalty card gives customers the chance, "at the right machine at the right time, you could pull a nonwinning hand but still win up to $150,000 through our Jumbo Jackpot program," Bastille said.