Crown rolls dice on hospitality as it attempts to move its focus away from purely gambling

Crown Resorts will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new hospitality attractions in order to be less casino focused.

Inside Crown’s Sydney gaming lounge. Picture: Max Mason-Hubers

Crown Resorts will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on new hospitality attractions including bars and restaurants as it moves to become less “casino-centric” amid tighter regulation of gaming operations.

Crown Resorts chief executive Ciaran Carruthers told The Australian that while the company would always be proud of its casinos, it had lagged international trends in the gaming industry that stressed resort-style attractions over gambling.

“Any visitor to our properties in the last two or three months would have seen in Melbourne some significant changes already in terms of a number of new bars, while similarly in Perth we are well advanced with new bars and new restaurants,” said Mr Carruthers.

“The investment potential is significant, but how we actually deploy that over the next couple of years is still being determined. But certainly it will be in the many hundreds of millions of dollars here in Melbourne and similarly in Perth.”

A view of the Crown Casino in Sydney. Picture: Gaye Gerard

Crown Resorts contributes nearly $5bn to the national economy each year, according to a report to be released at Australia’s Economic Outlook summit this Friday.

But Crown’s operations continue to be hit by worsening economic conditions and costlier regulatory oversight. Last year the company closed a VIP gaming floor and axed nearly 100 jobs at its new $2.2bn casino in Sydney’s Barangaroo, citing “macroeconomic challenges” which have kept high-rollers away.

“Globally, integrated resorts have moved to more hospitality and a complete service offering focus rather than being just casino-centric,” said Mr Carruthers, who started his career as a dealer in a London casino.

“We’ve lagged with that as a company and as an industry here in Australia. I started as a dealer in this industry 35 years ago and I’ll never shy away from that part of my culture.

Crown ready to serve up entertainment, but tourists scarce

“But if you look at where Vegas has been for the last couple of decades, and even in places like Macau, the importance of non-gaming revenue has taken a much more central role.”

Crown Resorts and competitor Star Entertainment have been faced hefty fines and tougher oversight after being found to have facilitated money laundering and organised crime. Regulators in NSW and Victoria have ruled Crown will be allowed to keep both its Sydney and Melbourne casino licences. Star Entertainment still faces losing its Sydney casino licence.

“We have much stricter regulations than previously and necessarily so,” Mr Carruthers said.

“It’s a different way of working and a different cost structure. But also the marketing approach, the people that we reach out to and how we reach out to show that you can come here and have a great time regardless of how you look to be entertained.

“Whether it be live music, whether it be going to the spa, whether it be staying at the hotel, eating in fine dining or casual, going to a whiskey bar, going for pints, or going to the casino, or any combination of all of those things.”

Crown Resorts chief executive Ciaran Carruthers. Picture: Andrew Henshaw

Mr Carruthers said that in his time in the industry, regulations had changed from how to “keep bad people out of the industry” to providing a safe environment for casino customers. He referred to the Crown’s PlaySafe program, which provided 24/7 onsite support to prevent problem gambling and was increasingly using technology to do so.

“It’s more about making sure that it’s a safe environment for those people who like to come and be entertained, but who may develop a (gambling) issue or may be vulnerable to harm,” he said.

“When I look at programs like PlaySafe and the technologies that we’re looking to develop, it allows us to move away from relatively arbitrary restrictions in the belief that this would somehow protect people from harm to using real data around actual behaviour that will allow us to much better identify people that have the potential to be harmed before they actually find themselves in a challenged position.”

Mr Carruthers said that Crown, which this week signed a deal to become the official UFC Fan Hotel in Australia, would increasingly focus on major events as it moved to bring tourism numbers back to pre-Covid levels. There were 6.6 million international visitors last year, a deficit of more than two million compared to 2019 levels, according to Tourism Research ­Australia.

Victoria experienced the largest loss at 33 per cent, with NSW at 22 per cent. “Everybody knows the great success of the Taylor Swift event in more recent months,” he said.

“We have a longstanding engagement with things like the Australian Open and the AFL and we’re enhancing our engagement with Formula One here in Melbourne as well. We know those events are not only great for our properties but for the cities themselves.”

Visitors to Crown Resorts go on to spend $600m with other Australian businesses on various services and experiences after their visit.

Originally published as Crown rolls dice on hospitality as it attempts to move its focus away from purely gambling