The Online Threat: How The West End Continues To Thrive

The internet was supposed to kill the land casino. Mayfair had other plans.

When the first online casinos appeared in the mid-1990s, the smart money said the land-based casino was finished. Why would anyone drive to Mayfair, queue for a membership card, pay for a taxi and buy an overpriced drink when they could play the same games in their dressing gown from the comfort of their own home?

It was a reasonable question, and for a while it seemed as though the pessimists might be right. Footfall at some West End casinos dipped in the early years of the internet era. The operators who had built their businesses on the assumption that there was no alternative to their product suddenly found themselves competing with an industry that had none of their overheads and could offer a wider range of games at any time of day or night.

The land casino fights back

What happened next surprised everyone. Rather than collapsing under the pressure of online competition, the premium end of the London casino market went from strength to strength. The Hippodrome was transformed from a struggling nightclub into one of the most visited entertainment venues in Britain. Les Ambassadeurs was comprehensively refurbished. New operators like Wynn Resorts entered the market with ambitious plans for London's most prestigious addresses.

The reason, it turns out, is straightforward. Online casino gaming and land-based casino gaming are not the same product. They serve different needs. The online casino offers convenience, variety and the ability to play at three in the morning in complete privacy. The land casino offers something that no amount of software can replicate: an atmosphere, a social experience, the weight of history and the particular thrill of being physically present at a real roulette table with real money changing hands in real time.

Mayfair's casinos understood this distinction better than anyone. They are not in the business of providing a commodity. They are in the business of providing an experience. The Clermont Club does not compete with an online slots site. It competes with the best restaurants, the finest private members' clubs and the most exclusive entertainment experiences that London has to offer. On those terms, it wins every time.

The hybrid future

What the online era has done is sharpen the positioning of the best land-based operators. Rather than trying to compete on volume or variety – fights they cannot win against an industry with virtually unlimited server capacity – they have focused relentlessly on quality. The result is that the best Mayfair casinos today offer an experience that is genuinely world-class and utterly impossible to replicate online.

At the same time, the online and land-based markets have converged in ways that nobody predicted. Live dealer gaming, which streams real croupiers in real time to players around the world, has brought the atmosphere of the casino floor into the online experience. Mayfair Casino's own live dealer tables are testament to how far this technology has come: the HD streams, the professional dealers, the genuine cards and real roulette wheels create an experience that captures something essential about the casino floor without requiring anyone to leave their home.

The threat from online gaming did not kill the West End casino. It made it better. That is rather a Mayfair response to adversity, when you think about it.