Thursday, February 26, 2009

Mandalay Bay adds comps




No, no--not that Mandalay bay. The one in this hemisphere. (Confession: Until about two weeks ago, I didn't know there was another one. I thought it was just a made-up name.)

I was playing there tonight and was surprised to see a sign at the front desk announcing that they are now tracking player hours for food comps, $1/hour. Their system is kind of a pain in the neck, because they don't use your MGM/Mirage card. You fill out a form, then on every visit you have to have them fish it out of a box. You and the employee both initial it on your way in and on your way out. But still, it's a lot better than what they gave you before, which was a big fat nothing.

3 comments:

Ted said...

Correction: They used to give $1.25/hr via a $5 food coupon. You could give your name to the desk and if you had played at least 4 hours, they would process the comp. If you played 12 hours, they would give you 3 comps and that was the max.

This was not obvious and most people didn't know about it, but it was there. I still have a stack of pre-index card system comps in my desk.

Now they track hours cumulatively, which is a good thing, but process the comps per every 5 hours. So now I get $.25 less than I once did. The economy is hurting everyone and hey, those green index cards cost money. :)

I asked them about what is essentially a Point of Sale system enabling use of the MGM/Mirage plastic and they said it cost 50K to implement and they didn't want to spring for it.

Side Rant: They also don't serve real Red Bull. It's a Red Bull clone called Rhino and that makes Red Bull + Poker very unhappy, because Rhino gives me a headache. They do that because the poker room gets the receipts from the cocktail waitresses and they don't want to pay for the real thing. More signs o'the times.

Can you guys tell I had a bad night there tonight?

Jim Cheseborough said...

They always gave a $4 coupon for 4hrs play. And recently that became a $5 coupon. So..not sure what you mean.

Rakewell said...

I wasn't aware of anything previously. There was certainly no formal tracking system. Perhaps it worked kind of like Planet Hollywood--if you knew to ask in advance so that somebody would watch the clock, you could get some kind of comp. Now, however, it's being tracked, and the hours accumulate without expiration, or so I'm told.