You might be surprised at the things Baltimore-area casinos do to keep their high-spending customers happy — and the great lengths they’ll go to just to get them in the door.
A review of the transcript from a court proceeding at the end of August shines a bright light beyond the floors of Arundel Mills’ Maryland Live! Casino and the recently opened Horseshoe Casino Baltimore. It reveals gaming industry players tracking detailed personal information, fighting among themselves for customers and working to keep their own employees from jumping to competitors.
The transcript comes from an Aug. 29 preliminary injunction hearing in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Baltimore. Maryland Live! is suing one of its former employees, alleging she took a confidential customer list and used it to try to recruit gamblers to her new employer, the Horseshoe Casino. Judge Marvin J. Garbis issued a preliminary injunction even after it was revealed that the suit was sparked by an email sent to less than two dozen people.
That injunction only came after hours of revealing testimony, though. An early line of questioning revealed just how much information Maryland Live! keeps on its best customers.
Mario Maesano, the casino’s senior vice president of marketing, testified that it keeps a limited-access electronic database on its rewards program members that includes information ranging from their names to their children’s birthdays.
"It contains all their vital information," Maesano said. "Their name, their address, their date of birth, their telephone numbers, email addresses, their likes, their dislikes, their immediate family names, their kids’ names, their kids’ birthdays. It contains anything personal to that person."
The top two tiers of the five-tiered rewards program— which members move up in based on their spending patterns — are made up of about 2,000 people, Maesano testified. He compared the program to a supermarket or airline rewards program, something that’s free and voluntary for a customer to join and that offers rewards for those who spend often.
He also said Maryland Live! spent the better part of three years cultivating its list of big-spending members. He estimated the cost of putting together its database and winning customers’ loyalty was in nine-digit territory.
"That’s probably one of the No. 1 things a casino does when opening a property, is try to find a qualified list of players to market to," he said. "The value of such a list is, I don’t know, hundreds of millions of dollars."
Only two departments within Maryland Live! have access to the list, Maesano testified. One is the database marketing division, about five people who maintain the information and have full access to it. The other is player development, 20 or so people who reach out to players and cater to their needs.
The player development department is broken into different levels. The lowest-level employees, VIP hosts, aren’t assigned to specific players, but their goal is to help gamblers in the casino whenever possible. That includes getting drinks, making transportation arrangements or making show reservations, Maesano testified.
Moving up the ladder, another group of hosts handles a group of players who the casino views as having a certain value. Toward the top, executive hosts are assigned a smaller group of the highest-spending players and are tasked with making sure those players have everything they need.
"They are to be the player’s best friend," Maesano said.
The former Maryland Live! employee named in the casino’s lawsuit, Helena Wong, took the stand later and talked about how important big spenders are to individual casino employees. Wong joined the Horseshoe Casino as a multicultural executive host after she left Maryland Live! The Arundel Mills Casino is suing her but not the Horseshoe Casino.
Wong said she kept her own notebook of information on gamblers she met during her days at Maryland Live! and during a previous stint at Revel Casino in Atlantic City, N.J. The notebook contains information like a customer’s email address or telephone number, and she said she took down the information with players’ permission.
"This is how we work in this industry," she said. "When you get hired, the first thing they ask you is, ‘Do you have a book?’ You have to have contacts."
Wong described a shared bonus program at the Horseshoe Casino that rewards a group of employees when hosts bring in new players. And she testified that other Horseshoe employees contacted gamblers they knew to try to recruit them to the new casino.
She also said she’d heard a rumor from casino industry employees that Maryland Live! did not want its customers poached.
"There was a threat floating around that if we got caught contacting anyone, that they were going to come after us," she said. "They were going to come after us hard, and they weren’t going to stop."
That may have just been a rumor among employees. But testimony from Maryland Live! Senior Vice President and General Counsel Howard Weinstein made it clear the established casino does not want to lose players or employees to the Baltimore upstart.
Maryland Live! decided to bring some of its at-will employees under contracts that included noncompete clauses when it heard the Horseshoe Casino would be opening, Weinstein testified.
"There was discussion in the late winter, early spring of 2014 that Horseshoe would be opening — we didn’t know their opening date — that they would be poaching or attempting to poach our employees," he said. "We had put a lot of effort into training our employees, and for select job classifications, we had decided to seek certain arrangements with employees."
The noncompete agreement would have prevented employees from working for a competing casino within a certain geographic radius, Weinstein testified. He said he didn’t recall the exact distance but that it would have prevented employees from jumping to the Horseshoe Casino.
Wong left Maryland Live! without signing the noncompete clause. She would not have been able to stay at the casino without signing it.
"We clearly communicated to Ms. Wong and to others that this was a condition of employment, that we expected them to sign this, and if they did not sign this, they could no longer work for us," Weinstein said.
Even before Maryland Live! decided employees like Wong had to sign the noncompete agreement, the casino had confidentiality rules in place. VIP hosts had to sign an employee handbook with confidentiality provisions, Weinstein testified.

Replies:

No replies were posted for this topic.