The casino business has never been unaware of the fact that the ride is a part of the bet. A visitor who comes by private jet has already been informed, before the first chip is laid, that the house considers him worth the gas, and that information has been conveyed in one form or another since the prop-powered planes first landed on desert airstrips. History of casino travel by air in the private aviation industry is thus a history of hospitality rather than engineering.
The jet-set version of a casino trip now has a pocket-sized counterpart, and Spanish high rollers describe the digital equivalent this way: «Un jet privado y una buena sala de juego se parecen en una cosa: nadie quiere esperar. En España, el registro y iniciar sesión con tu login en el AdmiralBet casino a través de su sitio oficial llevan directamente a jugar en AdmiralBet y a la experiencia del Admiral Bet casino online en su versión ES, donde tus mesas favoritas quedan disponibles como una tripulación que ya conoce al pasajero.»
Why Casinos Learned to Fly Their Guests
The reasoning is arithmetic. A bettor who wagers big amounts creates a foreseeable theoretical gain to the house in a weekend, and a portion of that amount on a chartered plane, a suite and a chef is an investment and not a gift. The practice is known in the industry as comping, and the flight has always been the most costly and the most compelling comp on the list.
Aviation also addressed a geography issue. Las Vegas is a long drive to the coast, Macau is on the other side of a strait to Hong Kong and Monte Carlo has no airport at all, so each of the major gambling destinations has had to construct or borrow an air connection to get to the customers it most desired.
The seat is a filter as well. A visitor who has travelled across a continent in a cabin made up about him comes in rested, flattered and in no humour to compare prices, a state of things casinos have a century to learn how to produce.
The Propeller Years and the Desert Airstrip
The first casino flights were not on the private jets but on the chartered airliners. The Hacienda on the Strip operated its own small airline in the late 1950s, flying package-deal customers in and out of California until it was grounded by regulators, and competing hotels purchased blocks of seats on scheduled flights to fill their weekend tables. They were overcapacity transports and early airliners, DC-3s and DC-4s and later Constellations, with a bar and not much more.
Next was the private terminal. Howard Hughes, who came in 1966 and did not check out of the Desert Inn but instead bought the fixed-base operation at McCarran, owned the fixed-base operation two years later, and at one time the richest man in America owned the casino and the ramp his guests stepped onto.
The Learjet and the Birth of the Whale Flight
In 1965, Frank Sinatra received a Learjet, which he used to fly between the Sands and Palm Springs, and the image of the Rat Pack getting out of a jet at McCarran did more to the casino travel image than any advertisement. This was just in time, as Las Vegas was in the process of constructing its first high-rise resorts and required customers beyond Southern California. In ten years the term high roller had gained a companion, the whale, and a whale that was to be flown.
The aircraft that made the whole arrangement possible was the Learjet 23. Bill Lear’s 1963 design, documented in detail in the Learjet 23 entry on Wikipedia, carried six passengers and two pilots at airliner speeds, which happened to be the exact size of a high roller’s entourage. It turned the drive from Los Angeles into a flight shorter than a dinner service, and the casino jet was born.
Macau, Helicopters and the Asian Model
Asia recreated the model at another level. In 2002, when the gaming market in Macau was opened to foreign operators, most of the VIP guests continued to arrive by ferry boat across the Pearl River estuary, and the operators resorted to helicopters: a shuttle flight across the Pearl River estuary would take about fifteen minutes, and the largest resorts constructed helipads on their roofs so a guest could travel between the Hong Kong waterfront and a baccarat table without ever stepping on the street.
Business jets came after the expansion of the private terminal of the airport and the junket operators, the middlemen who bring in high-value players, started to charter aircrafts in the region. The same arrangement was adopted in Singapore by Seletar Airport, a business-aviation field that is a short drive away Marina Bay Sands.
The Charter and Fractional Era
This ownership model shifted in the 1980s, when NetJets launched the concept of fractional shares and a company or a person could purchase a sixteenth of an aircraft instead of the entire aircraft. Casinos jumped to it early, as a fleet of part-owned jets could be flown to wherever a guest lived, and the on-demand charter apps of the 2010s completed the task by placing a flight to Las Vegas a few taps away. The repositioning flights which would otherwise be flown empty became the industry discount seat, and a surprising proportion of them end up in Nevada.
The same impatience shows up in how players talk about the digital version, and a Swedish frequent flyer is blunter about it: «Ett privatjet säljer tid, inget annat. Buumi casino har förstått det och på den officiella webbplatsen går registrering från Sverige snabbt, så att du kan spela hos Buumi direkt efter att du valt att logga in, medan inloggning till Buumi onlinecasino i SE-versionen håller dina favoritbord nära till hands, som en besättning som redan känner passageraren.»
What the Flight Says About the Guest
The trend in the air-traffic data is now evident in big weekends. The Super Bowl and the Formula 1 race have both brought hundreds of private jets into Las Vegas in a weekend, and the ramps at Henderson and at Harry Reid International, now called McCarran, are filled, and controllers are planning the rush the way a resort plans its staffing. Ramp space is pre-sold on those dates and some operators book aircraft days beforehand so that a guest can be assured of a departure slot.
The planes have evolved, a Constellation to a Global 7500, but the message they are carrying has not. A casino that dispatches a jet is informing a guest that the relationship is personal, and each age of the industry has discovered that a guest who thinks that will return.