Last week I told you about our “surprise” trip back to Las Vegas. People were surprised to see us there, and honestly Brad and I surprised ourselves with this trip so soon after we had made the permanent move to Georgia. For one thing the move was extremely hard on both us, especially for Brad who is quite frail health wise, and we weren’t sure we had “recovered.”
However, we were pretty well settled into our new apartment home thanks to a lot of family support – and hopefully feeling strong enough for those long flights. And we really wanted to attend the Blackjack Ball on Feb. 22, to which we had been invited as special guests. I’ll talk more about that fascinating event in a later blog, but today I will talk about something that made that trip very tempting. Maybe you can guess why? It would be FREE!!!!!
We may have retired from frugal gambling but not from frugal thinking – and we still had a lot of comps left back in Vegas. Everyone knows how I hate to let valuable benefits expire and go to waste!
I’ve written a lot of negative things about CZR down through the years, and the future seems to look bleak for educated players as it is being taken over by El Dorado. But for the moment, we enjoyed a surprise new benefit that CZR just introduced late last year. (I wrote about this in a Nov. 21st blog.) Starting February 1st, 2020, they added a $600 travel benefit to Las Vegas for Diamond-tier players who had climbed up to 75,000 tier credits from the base requirement of 15,000. What was surprising about this advanced tier benefit was that it was based on your entire 2019 play. This backdating let us include our only play in 2019, which was early in the year before our decision to cut play at CZR and several other properties.
You can read more about these advanced Diamond benefits here. Unfortunately, the details are a bit vague. For example, since it mentions a flight to Vegas, what substitute benefit would a Las Vegas resident have? Perhaps one of those would share their personal experience about this in the “Comments.” This benefit is not as good as the Diamond travel perks of several years ago – but to have a new benefit of any kind from CZR was a welcome surprise.
In addition to having free airfare for the trip back to Vegas, we had another surprise. Although this new Diamond travel perk did not come with any room comp, our long-time NCM host, who knew our history of heavy play, obtained 5 free comped hotel nights for us although we hadn’t put in any play for almost a year. True, it was at the Rio, a neglected CZR property that hasn’t seen upgrades for years – and probably won’t until the new owner decides what to do with it after CZR management ends in two years. I think they are just glad to get warm bodies in the rooms and hope they will wander down to the casino and do some play. However, it was large – all suites there – and clean and we don’t need fancy digs – we’ve had enough of those for 35 years to satisfy any long-ago enthusiasm for luxury.
With the basic expenses covered, we spent 5 days roaming around Vegas “burning comps.” We turned as much of our benefits as we could into Free Play. Then comp-only balance would cover all our snacks and meals, but there was still so much left. So, we treated family and friends to meals and movies and shopping in casino gift shops – that last one an only-option choice trying my frugal soul with their jacked-up high prices. We bought candy for our great-grandkids Easter baskets. And when we couldn’t think of another thing to buy, we passed out gift cards that weren’t in our names so they could be used by others in the future.
We got the job done!
One wonders about the true value of a comp that induces you to do something you wouldn’t have dreamt of doing if it wasn’t for the comp.
Time has an intrinsic, tangible value and there is such a thing as opportunity cost.