Earlier this week, LVA received a tip that Herbst Gaming would be tearing down Whiskey Pete’s in January and closing Buffalo Bill’s as well. After receiving a somewhat guarded reply from Kirvin Doak, which is handling PR for the creditor-owned casinos, we were able to track down Herbst CEO COO Ferenc Szony. He said any closures were “news to me” and that Herbst wasn’t setting up any properties for shutdown. The company doesn’t usually rent midweek rooms at Whiskey Pete’s, he added, and a double-check of the booking engine confirms this. “It doesn’t make sense to run at really low occupancies,” he explained, adding that restaurants and other Whiskey Pete’s amenities would not be affected.
Szony likens the three properties to disparate wings of the same hotel and that Herbst tries to concentrate the energy and activity as much as possible, especially around the holidays when demand is “very quiet.” Ergo, room reservations are consolidated into Buffalo Bill’s As for the fact that the Web site for the Primm properties isn’t taking bookings past Dec. 30, Szony says the 2011 calendar may not be loaded into the site yet. Entertainment offerings taper off in November. “Trying to compete with Santa Claus is very tough in the Vegas market,” says the CEO, who promises new concert activity around New Year’s. Unless you count a pretty good outlet mall right next door, Primm isn’t a destination market — and yet it’s too close to Vegas to qualify as “convenience” gambling. That’s an unenviable marketing challenge.
I was the one who posed the question to LVA, based on an email from a friend who had just left Primm.
If all of the above is true, maybe Mr. Szony should make sure that his employees know all about the complicated strategy. It was an employee who told my friend that Whiskey Pete’s would be torn down, etc.