Former Revel casino comes back to life in Atlantic City
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — A Denver developer and New Jersey gambling regulators made a big bet Thursday on the future of Atlantic City and a casino that flopped four years ago, granting a casino licence to the Ocean Resort Casino a week before it is due to reopen.
The property is the former Revel casino, the $2.4-billion pleasure palace at the north end of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk. It shut down Sept. 2, 2014, after little more than two years of operation, during which it never came close to turning a profit.
But Bruce Deifik, who bought the casino for $200 million in January, is confident his management team has fixed what was wrong with Revel, including what customers repeatedly said they didn’t like about it.
The casino will now allow smoking, single-night stays, offer generous player loyalty benefits, a buffet and a reconfigured casino floor that makes it much easier to get around. It even put safety panels on either side of the vertiginous escalators that made many patrons uncomfortable.
But perhaps the biggest change is one in attitude; Revel focused on high-end customers, who never showed up in sufficient enough numbers to offset the debt its original owners incurred.
Ocean Resort, by contrast, will welcome all customers.
“If you’re someone betting $5 or $10, how often does someone come up to you, shake your hand, ask how your day is coming and ask if there’s anything you need?” asked Frank Leone, Ocean Resort’s CEO.
“We are going to ensure that customers who don’t get personal attention at other properties get personal attention here.”
Leone said Revel deviated from casino industry best practices in many important ways, including meagre or non-existent comps and discount offers. He said a player who lost $10,000 gambling at Caesars might get as much as $4,000 of that back through comps or incentives to return to the property. That same customer at Revel not only lost $10,000, but was handed a $1,000 bill for hotel and food and beverage charges, Leone said.
“It’s simple economics,” he said. “Milk is $3 a gallon. You can’t sell it for $5.40 a gallon when everyone else is charging $3.”
One of the conditions imposed by state gambling regulators is that Ocean Resort maintain at least $36 million of liquidity at all times, a condition to which the casino agreed.
Ocean Resort will offer internet gambling beginning July 1.
It is due to open its doors at 1 p.m. on Thursday.