Casino loyalty programs are very good at putting players into buckets.
They earn points. They cross a hurdle. They move into a new tier. They get a different colored card and a new list of benefits.
But what if some of your most valuable player development opportunities are sitting in the wrong bucket?
That was the challenge Chris Archunde, Director of Marketing for Acoma Business Enterprises and Raving Partner, put in front of attendees at the Host Player Development Conference, alongside Adisa Johnson, General Manager of Robinson Rancheria Resort Casino & Bingo, and Kim Ortega, Marketing Manager at Little Creek Casino.
Their message was simple: Stop looking only at the card and start looking at the player.
The Players Between the Tiers
Archunde breaks players within each tier into three groups: basement, basic, and bubble.
Basement players sit toward the bottom of the tier. Basic players make up what she calls the “meaty middle.” Bubble players are sitting near the top, potentially close to moving into the next tier.
It was that last group that caught her attention years ago when Archunde, Ortega, and Johnson were all working together at the same casino property a year ago.
Like many properties, the casino had a large active database, while the top hosted group represented only a fraction of those players.
“What about the other 14,000?” Archunde asked.
No host team has enough hours in the day to personally develop thousands of players. The answer was to use the data to narrow the field.
When Archunde dug into the tiers, she found something interesting. Some of the bubble players in the tier immediately below the top tier were consistently outperforming basement and basic players who already held the highest card.
They were valuable. They were playing at a level worth paying attention to.
They just weren’t necessarily being developed.
That created a much more useful question than simply, “Who are our top tier players?”
Who is behaving like a top player, regardless of the card in their wallet?
Look at the Player, Not the Card
Ortega has seen exactly what happens when properties rely too heavily on tier status.
“The cards are nice. Everybody knows what comes with the card,” she said. But some guests reach a tier, get the coveted card and then disappear. Meanwhile, another player may be sitting in a lower tier and already playing at a level that deserves attention.
“If you’re able to look at them as a player and not their card, you’ll find a lot of hidden gems.”
That means looking for patterns.
Who resembles your best players? Who has strong ADT but lower frequency? Who recently enrolled and immediately demonstrated valuable play? Who has returned after being inactive? Who is increasing worth from visit to visit even though they aren’t accumulating enough trips to reach the next published hurdle?
Johnson described it as looking for behavioral proximity: identifying the characteristics of valuable VIPs and then finding other players in the database who are behaving similarly.
That requires a relationship that player development teams sometimes overlook.
Your database people.
“Form relationships with them because they have the keys to the car,” Johnson said.
At the property where the three had worked together, the team partnered with its database expert to identify players who looked like existing VIPs. Rather than hand the host team a list of hundreds or thousands of names, they could identify a much smaller group worth contacting.
Archunde compared it to the “lookalike” audiences used in digital advertising.
The same idea can be applied to player development.
Find the people already exhibiting the behaviors you value. Then go find more people who look like them.
The Monday List
Once the analytics were finished, the concept became decidedly low-tech.
They pulled a list every Monday.
Johnson said the list typically contained around 100 players for outreach. And because the property didn’t have an army of junior hosts available to make those contacts, the team used the people they did have.
Players club employees helped make calls.
Ortega also tapped the hotel reservation team, providing a matrix showing which offers guests qualified for and asking them to report back when a player accepted.
For six months, Ortega was the only host.
“You can’t say you never have people to do it,” she said. “You just have to look outside of your own department sometimes.”
That may be one of the most useful lessons for smaller properties. Player development does not have to stop because the host team is small.
But the outreach does need structure.
Ortega coached employees on how to speak with guests, provided talking points, and gave them clear parameters for what they could offer. The database identified the opportunity. Other departments helped create the touchpoint. The host could then take the relationship from there.
A Tier Upgrade Should Be More Than a New Card
Finding the player is only the beginning.
What happens when someone actually crosses the hurdle?
Too often, not much.
The system recognizes the upgrade. The guest gets a different card. Maybe a new benefit kicks in.
Ortega sees that moment differently.
“I think it’s a starting point for the relationship.”
That relationship doesn’t have to begin with an elaborate comp or grand gesture. Sometimes it begins with a host walking over and introducing herself.
Or, in one of Ortega’s examples, barely saying anything at all.
She described a player she had known for a year who simply wasn’t interested in chatting. When a new host enthusiastically decided he was going to get the guest talking, Ortega warned him not to push it.
Her advice was simple: introduce yourself. Walk by. Let him know you’re there.
Eventually, when the guest needs something, he calls for her.
“I’m doing it at his pace,” Ortega said. “I’m doing it to what he needs and what he requires at that point in time.”
That is player development stripped down to its most basic principle: Build the relationship the player wants, not the relationship the host expects the player to want.
Win Zero Day
Johnson takes that philosophy and puts a clock around it.
He calls the day a player reaches the next tier “zero day.”
For smaller properties competing against larger casinos, he believes that moment is an opportunity to do something the bigger competitor may not be able to do as quickly:
“Outpersonalize, out-recognize and out-humanize that process.”
At Robinson Rancheria, Johnson uses what he calls a player onboarding framework built around 30, 15, zero, 15, 30.
Thirty days before the anticipated tier change, the property reaches out personally.
At 15 days, there is another conversation and an update on the player’s progress.
At zero day, the celebration and relationship-building begin.
Then the contact continues 15 and 30 days afterward, introducing the guest to player development, events and even key property leaders.
The exact cadence doesn’t have to be the same at every casino. In fact, Johnson argues that it shouldn’t be.
“Every property has to set or create a tier onboarding journey for their property.”
The point is to have one.
Give Them Something Worth Climbing For
Archunde also challenged properties to take another look at what is actually waiting for players when they reach the next tier.
Too many loyalty programs have become “part of the furniture,” she said. They exist, but the hurdles, benefits and competitive position haven’t been seriously evaluated in years.
If every tier includes roughly the same collection of benefits, there isn’t much reason for a guest to care about climbing.
Instead, a tier hurdle can become part of the player development strategy.
Archunde suggested communicating with players as an evaluation period approaches. At 60 days, remind them where they stand. At 30 days, selected bubble players may be candidates for a challenge or fast-track opportunity. Five to 10 days before evaluation, review the players sitting near the line and make informed decisions about whether someone should be grandfathered or moved up.
The key is that these decisions aren’t based on a hunch.
“We had done the math.”
And once a casino develops a tier structure that works, Archunde cautioned against constantly tinkering with it.
Changing the rules every nine months erodes the very things the program is supposed to build: trust, confidence, and transparency.
Make the Achievement Feel Like Something
Ortega has also used intimate VIP dinners as a way to make top-tier recognition more personal.
In one example she shared, only 12 VIPs and their guests attended at a time. They dined with senior property leaders, giving players access to people they might otherwise never meet.
That access has value beyond making the guest feel important. Executives hear directly from some of the casino’s best customers about what is working — and what isn’t.
Newly crowned members of the tier could receive first priority, while later dinners could bring back guests who had previously raised an issue so leadership could follow up.
For larger VIP events, Ortega takes a different approach. Invitations can be based on ADT rather than card level, allowing strong players from other tiers into the room.
The higher the relationship goes, however, the more exclusive the experience becomes.
It comes back to a point Johnson made throughout the session.
What player development can provide its best guests is not necessarily more stuff.
It is access and convenience.
Go Hunting in the Lower Tiers
At the end of the session, the conversation returned to the question that started it.
Should hosts simply work the top few percent of every tier?
Not necessarily.
A player already making 20 trips a month may have very little room to increase frequency. But a high-ADT player making fewer trips could represent a very different opportunity.
That is where the Monday list comes back in.
It isn’t strictly tier-based. It is behavior-based.
And that distinction may be the difference between spending all of your player development resources taking care of the people you already know and discovering the valuable players you don’t.
As Archunde put it, that’s how you “go hunting on the lower tiers.”
Your next great hosted player may already be in your database.
They just might be carrying the wrong color card.
