We need service from a major airline, like Southwest, that services resort destinations (the largest carrier to Las Vegas), and also offers affordable fares without charging for luggage, or changing and canceling flight reservations. Southwest is a very large carrier to and from Atlanta, with a metro population of nearly six million, that has no casino gaming nearby. Plus they have over 90 flights a day from the world’s busiest airport, Hartsfield International, to Las Vegas, of which six or seven are non-stop.

AC has 190 nights and days a year, mid-week, in the Fall, Winter and Spring, where we offer enormous discounts, especially on rooms, where a weekend rate of $300 to over $500 per night, drops 80 to 90 percent, sometimes under $40, bringing our average annual rate down to $108, compared to the larger LV Strip properties of over $171. So on the Strip the casino department provides only 27.3 percent of a casinos operating profit, where in Atlantic City, it is 92 percent, with only one property, Harrah's, that earns more from the hotel operations, than the casino.

I expect they have learned this from their parent company, Caesars Entertainment, where most of the Vegas profit comes from the rooms, food and beverage, convention, retail operations, and possibly entertainment; not the casino. The Las Vegas picture was much more like Atlantic City, prior to the 1990's when Sheldon Adelson brought the Comdex Trade Show to town, needing to house 170,000 attendees and exhibitors.

In those days Las Vegas properties, like the Hilton, Bally, Caesars and others, preferred in-house conventions, so that all the room, function, public space rentals and by the way, casino play, was offered to a captive audience. Since 1990, and the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas has changed, but AC is still like Vegas in the 1960's and 70's, disdaining city wide conventions, preferring to sell their mid-week off season rooms at a money loosing rate.

The 24 larger Las Vegas Strip resorts have a cost per occupied room of $60, so with a $172 average room rate, they profit about $112 per occupied room, producing 28 percent of the resort revenues, but 41.9 percent of the operating earnings.

The 24 largest Las Vegas Strip properties had the following revenue, percentage of departmental earnings, and each departments contribution to EBITDA, for the Year ending 6/30/2017:

                                  Revenue Per           Percent of           Percent of Dept           Percent Contribution
                                  Occupied Rm.         Revenue              Earnings                      to EBITDA
Casino Department     $209.53                  34.0                     35.6                            27.3
Rooms Department     $171.60                  28.0                     65.0                            40.9
Food/ Beverage          $141.85                  23.1                     26.5                           13.8
Convention/Other       $ 90.66                  14.8                     54.0                            18.0


Prior to Pennsylvania's approval of slot casinos in 2006, Atlantic City depended on line run buses, to help provide over 14 million customers annually to AC casino resorts. When we started them at Resorts International, in November 1978, they were only allowed Monday thru Friday, arriving before noon and leaving prior to 6 PM, with no cash gifts, which became a war several years later. But these buses did not include many overnight stays, as the originating cities were close enough to AC for a round trip, still leaving 6 hours or more at the casino resort.

But AC has lost over 90 percent of its bus customers, and now relies on cheap rooms or comped rooms and food and beverage, along with free slot play, to attract a much smaller number of visitors to those mid-week, off season days and nights. Our visitor totals have declined from over 35 million annually, to an estimated 22 million and our casino win from $5.2 billion, to not much more than $2 billion, if you deduct free play.

So for AC to survive, especially with 3,000 more casino rooms and two new large casinos, we must find new markets, that are beyond a same day bus ride away; places like Atlanta, that are much closer to AC, than to Las Vegas, and not three time zones away. But this requires cooperation among the casinos to attract city wide conventions and trade shows, that can be accommodated in 20 or 30 thousand rooms, and we may have to subsidize the airline, by buying a negotiated number of tickets to get them to compete with service they most likely already have in Philadelphia.

We will attract some of our old customers, charmed by the new casinos, but there is no way that they will be coming with the same frequency, as the past because they can now find a casino nearby, in PA, NY, MD and DC, for their mid-week evening of fun and play.

Time is running out. Labor Day is here in 40+ days!