A Southern Gambling Trip Report (Part 1) – Planning

Brad and I do most of our gambling these days in Las Vegas because that is where we live and because traveling is becoming more tiring for us.  We did take that monumental 3-week road trip back east this last summer – but it took us at least 3 weeks to “recover.”  So with the exception of a short drive down to Laughlin once in awhile, when we do travel it is by air, a tiring option in itself and one we aren’t inclined to do often.

When we do decide to travel, our out-of-town trips are usually combos, with both visits with family and to casinos.  However, recently we took a trip south, one that was for the single purpose of visiting casinos, namely, Harrah’s New Orleans and the Grand Biloxi. I thought it might be a helpful resource if I gave a very detailed report of this trip, telling the how’s and why’s.  It probably will be a long report that I will have to chop up in segments.  And it  probably will be somewhat rambling since the teacher in me is hard to keep down – I figure I will have to stop frequently to give a “lesson.”

So here goes!  I am an old hand at planning out-of-town trips to casinos.  Brad’s and my first casino-bound trip was in March of 1984, from Indianapolis to Las Vegas.  We came on a 4-day-3-night travel-agency package that had us staying at the aging Landmark.  We didn’t have much information about Vegas and even less about casino gambling before that trip, but we had so much fun on that visit that on the plane home we started figuring out how we could go back soon.  I went to the library and checked out a whole stack of books on gambling. And within a few weeks we received a mailer from the Westward Ho (where I had given my name to a pit boss while I was playing a very uninformed game of blackjack on that first visit), with an offer of 3 free nights,.  That offer spurred us to make our second visit the following September.

So, now 27 ½ years later, I am using those same resources and tools, albeit as someone who is much older but wiser – and has more experience under her much-larger belt!  The impetus for this recent trip came from – you guessed it – mailers.  We get scores of mailers every week – in our snail-mail box and my computer Inbox.  With increased competition from the proliferation of casinos all over the country and the bad economy limiting people’s discretionary income, casinos are digging deeper into their databases – and doing more cross-property promotions – than I have ever seen before.  I love this situation because it gives us more choices and I can cherry-pick the best.

We used to visit Harrah’s New Orleans quite frequently because they sent us great offers – free food, big free-play amounts, and enough airfare reimbursement to cover our tickets.  But during the last year or so, the offers had declined considerably, to low levels that we could not see it as a positive play for us anymore even though they still had some good video poker paytables.  However, after about a year of non-play there, we were surprised to get what I call we-miss-you-mailers, with offers that were more like the ones we got in the good old days.   (Lesson:  Try putting a casino in “time-out” for awhile and see if you might get a please-come-back mailer.  Many casinos decrease their offers to regular players, figuring they are going to come anyway!)

To further encourage us to take this trip, we  also received mailers from Grand Biloxi.  We had been receiving very strong mailers from them every since a couple of combo trips there earlier in the year when we could also see all or part of the Frugal Princess family who live just 5 hours away.  However, the offers weren’t good enough for us to make a special trip that far from Vegas  . But now they looked pretty  juicy if we could combine them with a visit to Harrah’s New Orleans and their offers.

So after studying all the mailers we each received from both properties, I realized we could do a double combo:  Not only combine a visit to two properties, but choose a date for the visits that covered two (monthly) offer periods and double the amount of benefits we could collect.

(Big lesson:  Be an ice-cream-cone gambler.  Pile high as many dips of offers/promotions as you can.  This works well for us on a local level as well as on out-of-town trips.)

Stay tuned for Part 2.