程阳：欧洲地面娱乐场向互联网挺进

 

Sweden’s Casino Cosmopol is still waiting for the chance to extend its customer care into the online world, while Swiss casinos, like the one in Lucerne (left), are losing out to unlicensed online competition.

 

==========

 

EUROPE’S LAND-BASED CASINOS GO ONLINE

 

The brains behind some of Europe’s most successful landbased casinos are emphasising their own unique skills and their social responsibility as they seek to extend their brands online.

 

Simon Thomas, CEO and chairman of one of the UK’s largest casinos, London’s Hippodrome, has shown astonishing skill at making the most of its highly visited site on the edge of London’s Leicester Square, but the exploitation of his online real estate has been far less easy.

 

The entrepreneur spent more than £40m turning the Grade 2-listed West End building into a formidable venue, quickly gaining a 60 percent awareness ratio among Londoners of the local landmark.

 

The development of an online Hippodrome has been far harder. The casino has its own online portal but also has a partnership with American online poker giant PokerStars, which has a live floor inside the building.

 

“We are trying to make the most of technology, but it moves at an enormous rate,” Thomas said.

 

“When we opened online two years ago we were toying with mobile-enabled website, it’s now all mobile; people consume on tablets and phones, the impact that has had in just a few years has been breathtaking.

 

“To anticipate too far into the future is too challenging; the skill is to be sufficiently flight of foot that you can keep up with the change, not investing so heavily in one moment that you get stuck with it.”

 

“Naturally there is a risk of cannibalisation; it’s almost impossible to track on the threshold of a casino.

 

“People still want the glitz, the glamour and spectacle of an offline final, and that real world experience.

 

“Somewhere in the middle online is training people, learning how to play blackjack in that home environment, learning how to play roulette, and then they want to try the real thing.”

 

Thomas acknowledges the potential of online; however, he believes his customers will always seek the real world experience too.

 

“If you play online nothing replicates the feeling of playing on a really good blackjack table.”

 

“We are still very social creatures, getting dressed up, going into a glamorous place in the heart of the west end, enjoying themselves.”

 

Although UK casinos can offer all of their table games and slots online, many operators around Europe struggle with a limited range of products that will never replicate the casino floor experience.

 

Online casinos have soared in popularity in Sweden in recent years, but the government considers the games to be “high-risk” and the state-owned Swedish monopoly has not been allowed to offer them alongside its peer-to-peer poker website.

 

The unregulated market thrives, to the chagrin of, among others, state-owned Svenska Spel, which has asked the government for permission to offer online casino games in an effort to compete.

 

Svenska Spel’s chief executive Lennart Käll said the company knows the business, knows the risks and has a ready-made template from its poker offerings it would feasibly roll out.

 

 He said the firm’s best chance of halting the encroachment of unregulated online gambling is to emphasise its social responsibility.

 

“Svenska Spel’s brick and mortar casino business is operated by its wholly owned subsidiary; Casino Cosmopol,” Käll said.

 

“Many of our employees in Casino Cosmopol have been with us since the start over ten years ago.

 

“This means that we have substantial knowledge and experience on just about all aspects of casinos, from successful and appreciated games to indicators of problematic gambling behaviour.

 

“A relevant comparison is our online poker, when we introduced online poker we managed to take a substantial market share with a lower share of problematic gamblers than the so-called grey market operators.”

 

He said the overlap between land-based and online meant the casino had lost customers to grey market operators, which jarred with the company’s ethos of providing a safe environment.

 

“First and foremost we feel a responsibility towards those customers — where the risk is greatest our presence is most needed.

 

“So if we cannibalise from ourselves it really doesn’t matter and when we channel customers from the unregulated operators to a safer alternative it is a win for the customers as well as the society at large.

 

“What is detrimental is that there are an increasing amount of so-called grey market operators that is outside the reach of the Swedish regulator.

 

“Over time though the current situation with a completely unlevel playing field is not sustainable.

 

“We have confidence in that the current overview of the Swedish Gambling Act will rectify many of the problems that are a reality today.”

 

In Switzerland, where land-based casinos are forbidden from offering any form of online gambling, the issue of social responsibility is again the heart of their argument for looser regulation.

 

Marc Friedrich of the Swiss Casino Association said: “It is forbidden for everybody, but in spite of that there are many other offers from offshore sites, so for the players it is not forbidden to play.

 

“We think there are about 150m Swiss francs going to foreign companies each year, while the current rules are in place.

 

“The government is preparing new law and legislation, but we don’t think anything will be in place until 2018, and it will be too late for some by then.

 

“The money is going abroad when it could be kept within our borders.”

 

As land-based operators across Europe wrestle with different regulatory approaches that they believe frequently deny them a level playing field, and fail to protect them from illegal offers, one thing is common, a knowledge that potentially rewarding crossover is there as long as each operator is aware of their limits.

 

“Some of the large companies have their online strategy wrong,” Thomas told GamblingCompliance.

 

“They are offline operators, and they suddenly think they can take on the online big players, and they can’t, you’ve seen it with the betting shop chains, they have tried, and floundered — until they partner with online chains.

 

“We are offline players, we need to benefit where we can from online, but not try to take on the online people because they are better at it.”