Casino Connection Atlantic City

Interview with Larry Mullin

by Roger Gros

Larry Mullin, president of the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa, has experience in Atlantic City that’s long and deep. As an executive with the Trump organization, Mullin rose to become president of Trump Marina. Some wondered why he left that property to become executive vice president of marketing at Borgata, but now that he’s assumed its presidency, he clearly made the right choice. Mullin is a perfect fit for Borgata: young, energetic and intelligent. Mullin sat down with Casino Connection Editor Roger Gros last month to discuss the opening of the Borgata’s first expansion, and how he hopes the Borgata and other casinos in Atlantic City will continue to grow the market. The full interview, including Mullin’s views on the July state shutdown, can be accessed at the Casino Connection website (www.casinoconnection.com). Click on the podcast button to listen. Casino Connection: The $200 million expansion of Borgata has been very successful, but you really can’t tell where the “old” Borgata ends and the new begins. Did you plan it that way? Mullin: Yes, that was by design. Our thought process, led by Bob Boughner, was simply to make the Borgata larger, not have a new part and old part. But it does fulfill a lot of needs we realized early on that were not addressed. Just after we opened, we realized we were capacity-constrained in what we had to offer, from our gaming floor to our restaurants, and specifically our poker area. Now they have a real choice of limits and games. In addition to adding great gourmet restaurants—Bobby Flay Steak, Wolfgang Puck’s American Grill, and Michael Mina’s Seablue—we’ve also developed a cafeteria-like food court that is different than anything else in town. It offers a great variety of foods from eight different restaurants. Our nightlife, with mixx, B-Bar and Gypsy, was also very constrained, so we debuted a new club called mur.mur. This will give our customers yet another option. Why did you go so large with poker, moving to an 85-table room? We view the poker player like we do any other gaming customer, table games or slots. Many poker customers were ready to trade up from where they had been playing. But when customers would arrive ready to play poker, we were pricing them out. We weren’t able to compete in any of the stud games because hold ‘em is so popular. We now have the ability to offer the other games at all price points. And for tournaments, Borgata has become popular, not only locally, but all over the world, with our participation in the World Poker Tour and other events. We have a riser system that will accommodate a great visual for the televised tournaments. Do the celebrity restaurants really motivate a player to choose one casino over another? Certain celebrities do. But you also see a lot of celebrity restaurants that have failed. The three new ones that we have would not be here if it were not for the success of the existing restaurants we have—Old Homestead, Susana Foo and Luke Palladino. But the difference between the celebrity restaurants that make it or don’t make it is that they are great chefs first and celebrities second. Now this is just the first phase of the expansion. Tell us about the hotel expansion that is now under way. The Water Club will be a separate hotel at the Borgata. It will be 800 rooms and suites with five swimming pools, hence the name. We plan to open it all at once. We would have loved to open the hotel and our recent expansion at the same time, but we had to rush the first expansion so we could take advantage of the business that was already on the table. The Water Club will allow us to extend to the “rejecters” to this region and not depend so much on the day trip market. Everyone knows that service is at least as important as your amenities. How have you continued to encourage Borgata employees to provide that extraordinary service? In just the first few weeks since we’ve opened the expansion, we’ve taken a hard look to make sure that we’re meeting and exceeding our own expectations. We have high standards here. With a property like this and so many non-gaming amenities, customers have different expectations. From a hospitality and food and beverage standpoint, we need to make sure these customers are satisfied. All these things come back to consistency and managing the expectations of the customer. People hold us to a much higher standard than a lot of other operators in the market. You don’t have a huge retail component in this expansion or the subsequent one. Is there a reason you chose not to include a mall, like the Quarter or the Walk? When Borgata was first conceived, the original owner was Steve Wynn and Mirage Resorts. The idea was to build a second hotel with a more diversified retail product. And that thinking really hasn’t changed. We don’t know what MGM’s plans are at this stage, but we would expect that it would be something like CityCenter East, which has been widely quoted in the media. So it would have a large retail and even residential component. While you’d have to ask MGM what their plans are, we believe it would be a very favorable component. Should they choose to develop CityCenter, you believe it would complement the Borgata? Yes, by virtue of the agreement we have with them, the buildings will connect. We’ve had a great partnership with them so there’s no reason to believe that cooperation would not continue. Borgata has clearly grown the market in Atlantic City. Are you pleased with the way you’ve grown the market penetration into new demographics and regions of the East Coast? The proof is in the investment. When you see the return on your investment here, we’re clearly pleased with it and the rest of the market has not shut down. There are billions of dollars in the development phase because of what has happened here. But that’s not just because of Borgata. The other operators are seeing that this has been an underserved market that needed product to drive new business, not necessarily price and promotion. Most of what you’re seeing coming in now are non-gaming products. That’s very gratifying, but it’s still a great gaming market. When you bring in the right product and you promote it the way we’re all able to do, it’s probably the biggest diamond in the rough. People say how great the Las Vegas market is with a visitor and locals market, but we have both too. We have 25 million people within a two-hour drive, yet with the fine dining, new hotels and retail, we have an opportunity to grow all facets of our business. Are you concentrating on a younger demographic at Borgata? All age groups are important to us, but we saw an opportunity here that there as a very underserved customer who is that 25-40-year-old consumer. There just wasn’t the product here to attract them. They like to go to major metropolitan cities like Las Vegas or New York City to spend their free time and money. So they were looking for experiences that weren’t here. We had to first get the product here, position it and make sure that their expectations were met.

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