For this answer, we turned to a longtime out-of-town visitor turned local, Jean Scott.
As usual in casino matters, there’s no one simple answer. It all depends on your personal goals and interests, and where the casino is located.
Broadly speaking, the Strip and downtown casinos market more to out-of-town visitors and, therefore, a good number of their mailed offers are for free or discounted rooms. The off-Strip casinos mainly market to locals who are more interested in free/discounted food, frequent gift giveaways, and bounce-back cash. However, as locals, if you’ve been longtime customers and/or play fairly often and/or at high levels, you can often get free or reduced-price room nights if you contact a host.
For two years, before we made our final decision to take up Las Vegas residency, Brad and I had a condo both in Indianapolis and Las Vegas. We kept our Indiana driver’s licenses most of that time. That way we could give our out-of-town address to the Strip casino players clubs, but change our address to our local one at the off-Strip casinos. We never had a problem giving a local address, even though we also had an out-of-state license. Many visitors have residences in two states.
Eventually, our Indiana driver’s licenses were expiring and we had to get Nevada licenses. By that time, we found we still got most of the best mail offers as locals. However, whenever there’s a good promotion we hear about from our out-of-town friends, we can talk to a host and usually he/she can get the offer for us.
I know some couples who straddle the fence: One has a local license, the other has an out-of-state license. You have to be sure this doesn’t cause problems with car registration and insurance or residency for tax purposes. Many out-of-state visitors who come to Vegas frequently rent a local box at a private mail business like PostNet or the UPS Store in order to get exclusively local offers from casinos. I know some people who have both out-of-state and Nevada licenses (and several different names and addresses!) -– but now we’re getting into situations that are beyond the scope of this answer.
