After ‘best year in history,’ will Mississippi casinos break records again in 2022?
Casinos in Mississippi and across the United States shattered revenue records in 2021, even before meetings and conventions return, said Bill Miller, president and CEO of American Gaming Association.
“And tribal leader said the same thing — that they had the best year in their history,” he said Wednesday at the Southern Gaming Summit in Biloxi.
Commercial casinos last year hit $52 billion in gross gaming revenue for the first time in history, he said.
Mississippi casino revenue was nearly $2.7 billion in 2021, and for the first three months of this year, Mississippi and Coast casinos already are surpassing those record numbers. These numbers are spurring interest in casino investment in the state, said Jay McDaniel, executive director of the Gaming Commission.
The casinos also have $600 million a year in non-casino revenue and support more than 15,000 jobs, said Larry Gregory, executive director of the Mississippi Gaming and Hospitality Association that hosted the Gaming Summit.
This was done without business travel, Miller said, without conventions and trade shows that typically power a lot of these numbers.
“So I can only look at that and say we’ve still got another layer of economic growth coming,” he said.
A comeback win for Coast casino resorts
That was the trump card of the news Miller shared with Coast casino managers and industry leaders at the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino. He also praised the resiliency of his industry.
There are 989 casinos in American and in spring 2020, at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, “Every single one of them was shut down,” he said.
Casinos became economic and social hubs in their communities, he said, opening vaccination and testing centers and developing health and safety protocols not just to reopen, he said, but to stay open.
To bounce back from that to a record year “is nothing short of remarkable,” he said.
Also remarkable, he said, was the level of support Congress gave by including the casino industry in the Cares Act money.
“We were treated just the same as every other American business,” he said, something that didn’t happen after 911 or Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy or the national recession.
“I think that was an amazing moment for our industry,” he said, and shows Congress now recognizes casinos as a mainstream business.
“They know how many jobs we create, the number of small businesses we support and the amount of taxes that we pay,” he said. “We’re as big as the airline industry.”
Other quick quotes:
Here are some other quotes from Miller at the Southern Gaming Summit:
▪ Sports betting in Mississippi — “I think every state has decided differently,” he said about allowing online sports betting. Mississippi was one of the first states to legalize sports betting, but legislators haven’t approved online betting.
▪ Technology transformation — “Most people today, even older folks, don’t carry cash around anymore,” he said. “And COVID kind of accelerated that.” Casinos won’t be discriminating against cash, he said, just offering a way for people to pay digitally like they do for coffee. “We don’t want to be the laggards,” he said. “We want to be the leaders.”
▪ Illegal gambling — Stopping illegal betting is a top priority for the American Gaming Association and Miller said he recently wrote to the U.S. Attorney General to ask for help. “These are the termites that are eating at the timbers of the legal industry,” he said of the illegal online betting sites.
▪ Supporting communities — States set the tax rate for casinos and have expectations for the casinos that he said are opening in locations where industry has left and that need the economic push. “It’s almost always to support communities that got left behind,” he said.
This story was originally published May 4, 2022 at 3:59 PM.
