Booking Marketing Offers Online

I agree with DK528 that Borgata has the best interface. Once you log onto your account, you can easily see all your offers (rooms and free play), your comp and slot dollars earned, and your progress to the next tier. It's always very easy to make reservations. The room calendar -- which is up to three months out -- easily shows whether you have a comp room available or a discounted rate for a particular date. If I want to take advantage of an offer for which a reservation is necessary, I just pick on the offer and book it right there and then. My only issue with the interface is that it doesn't allow you to cancel a reservation. To cancel, you need to call in, but you can usually get someone quickly and they are pretty knowledgeable. I'm hoping that once the Borgata switches over to mLife that it keeps its current interface.

 

To me, this is a much bigger pain point than booking offers online... right now there's no way to tell where you are in the annual cycle, how many points you need to get to the next tier or maintain your current tier, and how many "spendable" points you have. CET's system is horrible in so many other ways, but I find the tier credit / resort credit distinction really simple and easy to follow (it's also better than mlife's points / tier credits / express comps system). It would also be nice to see the status of your other benefits online (i.e., whether you've used your companion nights for the current annual cycle).

It would be convenient to book offers online, but calling the reservations line only takes a minute and I've never had any problems (unlike CET where it seems there's always some issue that requires you to invest a bunch of time). Obviously, emailing your host is even easier. I think the reason for this is Cosmo basically only has one offer outstanding at a given time, so there's no confusion about which one you're trying to book or whether it's valid for some date or another. I really like this system, just give me the highest amount of free play possible for any given date and that's it, I don't need a complicated matrix or calendar with multiple overlapping offers. Sometimes, too much choice just overcomplicates things without adding any benefit (see CET).

That said, if you were building a booking system from the ground up, I think it would be better to model it after airline booking systems rather than any existing casino's online system. My guess is the vast majority of guests pick a date first, then want to see which offers / rooms are available for that date. As an example, you could imagine a casino booking system looking like Southwest's website, but instead of check boxes for "Nonstop" and "Direct" you could have either the different room types or different available offers, with the list of "flights" being the other variable. For the guests who start with a specific offer in mind and just want to visit when that offer is valid, the airlines have already built a "Flexible Dates" system as well.

 

Well that with CET and sometimes you get better rates/comped nights by NOT clicking an offer

 

Do we have any kind of ETA on when this new system will be rolling out?

 

So knowing how most large scale IT projects go... Likely the end of 2018

Thanks for the estimate! I'll just have to bug my host more often until then. Thanks again for the referral to Tonya, she is great!

 

I would love to stay here in October, is there any special offers for members?
I had planned on staying at Delano for 3 nights, with mlife discount.

 

I think everyone has touched on the important points regarding the interface for booking online. I HATE talking on the phone so being able to book online would be wonderful. In the meantime though, I would really, really, really appreciate if you could start providing a few more details in your emails about room offers. For example got my latest one yesterday after a stay earlier this month. It says "Enjoy 2 nights in modern luxury high above the Las Vegas Strip". No details on room type or whether I have to pay the resort fee. I find it really annoying to have to call just to find out that basic information.

 

Biggest thing I'd like to see is a way to track my tier progression (NOT Identity points) online. Hate having to email identity desk or host.

 

One thing I'll say about this is that it appears that when Cosmo is calculating an offer for a player, somewhere in there they are calculating a total comp value for the room, specifically for you. I'm not sure whether they make it an average per night, or a total per stay, or exactly how they do it.

But, I play in a fairly narrow range in terms of ADT. And I always stay on a Tue-Wed-Thu-Fri nights. I've called to book offers and I've been able to get anything from a Terrace Studio up to a Terrace Suite.

When I got my most recent offer, I can't book it, because it expires before my next trip, but I was curious so I called to see what room type it would cover and they said it depends on the dates. So it's price/date-sensitive. And if you look at almost any hotel's rates these days, the prices seem to gyrate all over the place even midweek, much more than they used to.

I think this is pretty similar to how CET does it. You can go into the availability calendar and it will show you all the room types you can get comped. And some dates you can get a higher room type than others.

So the difference is, Cosmo doesn't have the offers online, and they can't put the room type in the offer email you get because it depends on the dates you want to book.

MLife on the other hand, their offers pretty much lock you into a max room type for a given property. And then when you go to their calendar to book an offer, either you get that room type on those dates or you're blacked out totally.

 

Boyd is amazing at this in pretty much real time

 

Thanks Chuck - I'm used to only MLIFE offers so I didn't really think about it being date dependent but that does make sense.

 

Chuck,
You made some great points.
Cosmo is 100% supply & demand; i.e.: they assign a comp value to your offer, and whatever room you can get for that value, is what you can get.
IIMHO, this is the second best system (the best being, if you have an offer for a room and the hotel isn't at 100% occupancy) you get a room.
Now with that said, CET has the worst model of this system; where they block out X amount of rooms to give for "comp" rooms, and once THOSE rooms are gone, no comp rooms are "available" (even though hotel occupancy might only be 60%; unless you're 7* or a huge loser where they KNOW they'll make a bunch of money off of you)

I dunno if this has already taken place, Kevin, but I work/have worked close with the UI/UX teams at a couple of high profile start-ups, and have experience with general gambler patterns, so if you want to have your designers get in contact with me, I'd sure like to talk to them.

 

Hi,

As an international guest we can't log on at all and have to go through a host, which is fine I guess, I just always feel I'm bothering our host (who is always great by the way) we'd really love it if you could improve the platform to allow guest from the UK and other countries to log on and see what they have available it allows the traveller to arrange their trip without waiting on an e-mail back. I can't comment on the rest as I've never seen the site

 

Jonathan, don't feel left out. They don't have a players club web site yet - that's what they're working on now.

 

Oh now I feel stupid. I'm sure our host said we couldn't access due to being an international guest.

 

Actually, players can access one bit of information - their Identity Points balance - that's it.


I think the reason you can't access it is that it requires entering a Zip/Postal Code.

Once they have a full site up and running, I imagine you'll access it with your account number or email, and a password.

 

I also get that far Johnny, I see my points but we have to also wait for the CET/Mlife style 'login to see your offers' system.

In the meantime it never hurts to call and see whats on the table. Whilst I didn't have room offers last time round I called and had $50 freeplay waiting for me I wouldn't have otherwise known about. The Customer Service agents at Cosmo in my experience are great also

 

Thanks Simon. I already have my offer booked for this time and my host is excellent and even changed dates for me to accommodate me so no compliants Jamie is lovely