The Harrah's Treatment: You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But You Can Never Leave

Before going to Tunica, I called some transportation places to arrange a ride from the Memphis airport. The prices I was quoted were in the $110-$130 range roundtrip (for a 30 minute drive), which is actually more than what it would have cost to rent a car. I was sharing the absurdity of this to a friend who lives in the area. He told me, "dude, just call a casino host, I'm sure they'll hook you up."

Good idea, Tim!

So I called Harrah's and spoke with a host. Ride from the airport? No problem. It was free and the driver was waiting for me on time when my flight landed. Gotta love a good recession.

Anyway, since I've been a little light on bankroll lately, I only brought $5,500 with me. After washing out of the $5,150 WSOP Circuit event, I was more or less busto for the trip. I had also recently lost my ATM card, so getting more cash with which to gamble was out of the question.

The day before my flight home, I requested a host so I could arrange a ride back to the airport. A tall, blonde woman in her early 40s named Deborah greeted me. She told me she would need to see my Total Rewards card to check how active I had been at the casino. Knowing from previous experience that they don't really take good care of their WSOP participants, I warned her that the only thing I had done since being at the casino was play the $5k event.

Still, I figured they'd probably take care of me anyway. After all, I was just asking for a ride to the airport. Not exactly demanding food and hotel along with it, since I was fully aware that my presence on this trip wasn't exactly a big money maker for them.

"Sorry, the play is just not there, we can't do transportation," Deborah told me. I politely explained to her that, needless to say, I thought it was a little shitty that they'd be willing to pick me up and then just strand me there after "all" I had done was play a $5,000 buy-in tournament. I mean, you'd think they'd be willing to take some basic steps to keep a person walking into a casino with that kind of money satisfied.

But I'm no stranger to the gaming industry. Harrah's has some notoriety for treating their high-value customers as disposable. I wasn't exactly shocked that something like this would happen, so I mostly kept my cool and didn't make a big deal about it.

Since Deborah had at least been cordial and I was bored anyway waiting for the aforementioned friend to meet me, I decided to sit down with what little money I had and start playing some $25/hand blackjack. High risk of ruin, sure, but I maintain a "no red chips" policy so as not to be confused for some nitty college kid.

Between my friend running extremely late and me running half-decent at blackjack for a while, before I knew it I had been playing $25/hand for three hours. I'll bet they'll give me a ride now, right? I mean, after all, it is a Tuesday in the middle-of-nowhere Mississippi during a recession. The play I just put in made me a relative whale considering the circumstances. So I can have a ride, right?

Wrong.

I talked to a new host this time, a guy named Jim. After looking at my play, he told me they couldn't do transportation for me. Furthermore, he had the audacity to tell me that I was up $100 despite the fact that I had actually dropped $300 to them.

What seems to have happened is that one of the floor managers forgot to enter me into the system at some point, so they didn't properly track my play. At this point, I was just fed up with the incompetence, so I just let loose.

I'm still shocked that someone walked into their casino with $5,500 on hand, which probably is somewhere in the 97-99 percentile of their customers, lost it all, and couldn't get a simple ride back to the airport. This is all aggravated by the fact that they gave me a ride there in the first place! You just don't do that to a customer. It's bad business.

I let loose on Jim for a while more because it felt good than anything else. The issue wasn't about the $60 I wound up having to pay for a ride the next day, the issue is about Harrah's jaw-dropping incompetence as an organization. Their hosts are like robots programmed to read whatever they see on a computer screen. Jim and Deborah made no effort to add a human element to the proceedings or attempt to understand why, perhaps, it made sense to bend the rules just this once.

These places are just getting killed right now (check stock prices of MGM and LVS). We can't know exactly how bad Harrah's is doing because they're a private company now, but it can't be good.

A crippling recession comes along that wipes out 90% of the value of the casino industry, and these guys can't give a ride to the airport to a young man who comes through their doors with $5,500? Shit, the van and the driver were probably just sitting in the parking lot anyway! It would have cost them like $5 in gas money to keep me happy in this situation, but they chose not to, and now that savings is going to be wiped out a hundred times over.

I'm done with Harrah's completely except for the WSOP. I'll give them credit for doing a decent job operating the WSOP, and it's simply too much a part of my life for me to boycott that too, but as far as hotel, restaurants, blackjack, craps, shopping, etc... screw 'em. I'm done with that organization barring satisfactory compensation from this incident.

I'll try passing this blog post along to their management, but I'm guessing they're probably so incompetent that you can't even get in touch with them to tell them how incompetent they are.

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These are the Harrah's properties in Las Vegas you won't find me at:

Bally's
Caesars
Paris
Flamingo
Imperial Palace
Harrah's
O'Sheas
Bill's Gambling Hall