For generations, the Higbee Building was synonymous with the holidays, so when Dan Gilbert’s JACK Entertainment opened the Horseshoe Casino Cleveland there in 2012 they looked to capitalize on the nostalgia by decorating the place like it once was in its department store heyday.
It was a plan that paid off for the casino bringing in strong numbers during what can be a slow month. This year though, the holiday magic wasn’t quite there as the casino brought in $16.5 million after all bets were paid a $2.3 million or 12.2 percent drop over December of last year and a 22.2 percent drop over 2015.
This was also the casino’s first since severing ties with Caesars Entertainment and changing its name from Horseshoe to Jack.
Casino analyst and publisher of Global Gaming Business Roger Gros believes that played a factor in the drop.
"When you pull the nation's leading loyalty club out of two of the casinos there, it has an impact; you lose track of the potential customers. All you've got is your database of people that have been there before,” Gros said.
Jack Entertainment CEO Matt Cullen blamed the dropoff on weather and said they were successful in transitioning the property without a major hit. Year to year revenues at Jack Cleveland were down $9.1 million or 4.2 percent.
“In many instances when you see that, you see a significant dip in revenue in the near term, we didn’t have that,” said Cullen.
“December, as I mentioned was probably more impacted by weather and we had some other things during the course of the year in Cleveland that while we were very excited about they certainly had an impact on us like the Republican National Convention and the basketball playoffs and the Cleveland Indians. So it’s fun to celebrate those things sometimes they have an impact on our guests’ ability to get into the property.”
The name of the casino may have changed but what hasn’t at this point Cullen said are any plans for a second downtown casino often referred to as Phase II.
“I think our position on Phase II is still the same, it’s not clear that there’s demand for additional capacity at this time,” Cullen said.
“We still are committed to doing a mixed-use development on that site, continue to evaluate opportunities for that. In the future that could include additional gaming but it’s nothing we have on our radar screen right now.
“We recently bought the Avenue Shops [Tower City], we’re putting a lot of money into the Quicken Loans Arena, I mean we will be north of $2 billion worth of investments in downtown Cleveland in the very near future so we’re very bullish on it and that site, the Huron Road site is a great site, I mean obviously because of the grade issues there it requires a project of some significant scale so we continue to evaluate options there but no timeline at this point.”
