Vol. 4, No. 4, April 2007
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Vince Donlevie
Harrah’s Chester Casino & Racetrack opened Pennsylvania’s third slot venue in January. The racino is the state’s first slot venue to be built from the ground up, opening the standardbred track last fall, and achieving success with a beautiful facility on the Delaware River waterfront in Chester, Pennsylvania, before the upper-level, 100,000-square-foot slot casino was even unveiled. Vince Donlevie, a longtime Harrah’s executive who was actually born in Chester, was moved from Harrah’s Joliet, Illinois property two years ago to assume the post as senior vice president and general manager of Harrah’s Chester. Casino Connection Managing Editor Frank Legato spoke with Donlevie in March.
Casino Connection: With the first six weeks of slot operations on record, has the slot win stacked up to your projections so far?
Donlevie: Absolutely—it has exceeded our expectations. We have had a tremendous opening, with lots of people coming to visit our property and really enjoying the facility.
What have been the biggest challenges so far, and how have you resolved them?
Like any opening, there are just a thousand moving parts that you have to get together to get everything running in the same direction. We have got a great team of people who are really working hard to make us a success. The biggest challenge was handling the volume of business that came to see us in the first couple of weeks.
Have you had a chance to gauge where your customers are coming from yet?
I would say the majority of our business is from the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area at large. It has been pretty evenly distributed, and we’ve been impressed with the fact that folks have come from good distances as well as local.
How has business been on the non-gaming side?
Very good. We have had tremendous volumes at our buffet, as well as in our End Zone restaurant. We’ve got a Club Cap Restaurant coffee bar and sandwich shop that has just done enormous volumes as well. We’ve got Winning Streaks on the racing level, which has enormous spillover from the volumes that have come in for the slot side of the business, and we just opened up our fine dining experience, the Cove at Riverview. We’ve gotten tremendous response from the customers in terms of that experience.
What are you most excited about so far?
The thing that excites me is the response that we have gotten from the customers. They have come here in large response to our facility. They’ve loved our product, the facility itself as well as our slot floor. We have gotten tremendous feedback on our slot product offering, the signage package, the overall feel of the casino, the openness of the layout. On top of that, we’ve seen lots of folks from the Harrah’s brand come here with their Total Rewards cards in hand and understanding and knowing the Harrah’s product.
How has the slot operation affected your racing operation, and vice versa?
There has been a tremendous upsurge in the simulcast business as we’ve seen the opening of the slot facility, and they are very much complementing each other. As we see our slot revenues go up, we see our simulcast go up.
Harrah’s Chester was promoted as an important part of Chester's renaissance. How has that played out as far as the local community goes?
There are so many benefits to the local community. First and foremost, we are in an absolutely beautiful site. We took what was a brown field—an old, beat-up, closed-down site that was overgrown and run-down—and we’ve cleaned that up and converted that to a beautiful setting on the Delaware River with fabulous views across the river to Jersey and very interesting traffic going up and down the waterway. The second benefit is the jobs that this has afforded to the community. We have reached out very aggressively into the Chester community with a “Chester first” approach to our recruitment. In addition to that, there is a $10 million minimum tax that goes from our gaming revenues to the city of Chester’s municipal budget, which is equal to a third of their existing budget.
Tell us about the advantage of having the only Harrah's-branded property in Pennsylvania, and the Total Rewards player’s club.
Total Rewards is the number-one rewards program in the entire country. It links all of our properties, which is in the neighborhood of 40 properties, on a cross-functional basis, so a customer who earns Reward Credits in Chester can redeem them in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. If they earn their Rewards Credits in Atlantic City or Vegas they can spend them in Chester, so that is a tremendous benefit right out of the box.
How has the synergy worked out with Atlantic City?
We continually remind our customers both in Atlantic City and here that if you earn in Chester you can redeem in Atlantic City. If you earn in Atlantic City you can redeem in Chester and we will continue to leverage the Atlantic City facilities as a reason to continue to play here in Chester. The equity that is being built within the Harrah’s Chester facility has flexibility throughout our company, whether it’s Atlantic City or Las Vegas. We’ve also utilized overnight stays in Atlantic City as an offering for new customer sign-ups at our facility. That’s a benefit that we have that our competitors in this local marketplace don’t enjoy, so we are taking full advantage of that.
In general, do you view yourself as competing with Atlantic City, or as an additional outlet for Harrah’s Atlantic City customers?
We look at ourselves as very complementary to Atlantic City in so many ways. We will certainly be a local convenience alternative for customers who will continue to go to Atlantic City, who will do their weekends and overnights and day trips to Atlantic City, because that’s the big show in gaming on the East Coast. We will continue to work hand in hand with them to make sure that we get the full advantage of the database, and to make sure that customers understand that this is another vehicle for them to earn Reward Credits redeemable there. It’s also a great opportunity for us to introduce Harrah’s to a lot of the non-Harrah’s customers who currently go to Atlantic City, because we are right in their back yard. They are going to come and be part of our operation, and they will then begin to understand maybe more clearly the Harrah’s experience and more clearly the benefits and the equity of the Total Rewards brand. That will only further grow our Atlantic City business.
What are your biggest challenges and opportunities going forward?
The challenges are pretty much always the same—working hard to develop a great service experience. And I absolutely know that we will develop a great service culture here. We already have established that in the customers’ minds. Maintaining that over the long hall is one of the top priorities for us as we move forward. The continuous improvement of every element of our operation is one of the things that we will be focused on.
