Gregg Solomon, Chief Executive Officer of Detroit Entertainment LLC (owner of MotorCity Casino Hotel), is justifiably proud of the casino’s recent expansion; it’s a casino that has embraced innovation and technology to create what sounds like an outstanding customer experience. In a city not noted for tourism, Detroit boasts three casinos (there is a fourth, but it is actually across the border in Canada, the Casino Windsor in Ontario) with a turnover of around $1.2billion a year. It’s the fifth largest gaming city in the US, and it’s fair to say operators have to come up with something special to retain their customers.
Gregg took some time to chat with Casino International and explain what they have done at MotorCity.

Casino International: How long has gaming been legal in Detroit?
Gregg Solomon: Since 1999, when we opened.

CI: What’s in Detroit to justify a thriving gaming industry? It’s not a city noted for its tourism.
GS: Detroit is a city of paradoxes. For those who have visited before the last several years the image would have been a negative one. In recent years a lot of things have happened, including a new airport and two new stadiums in downtown Detroit: Comerica Park and Ford Field, professional baseball and football respectively. Also several large companies have returned to the downtown Detroit area – GM moved their world headquarters to the Renaissance Center. Compuware built a huge facility and then the three casinos themselves are all in very close proximity to each other.
The thing that is happening as of late is that Detroit is building housing in the downtown area which is usually a prerequisite for any revival of an urban centre. Hotels, condos, lofta-miniums as they call them, all of that is going on and a huge amount of freeway construction had been done prior to Detroit’s hosting of the 2006 Super Bowl. And quite frankly, we’re happy to be here.

CI: What’s the history of your organisation?
GS: Marion Illitch, the owner of MotorCity Casino Hotel, and her husband started a with a pizza franchise in the Detroit area in 1959, and since that time they have built that entity to the company now known as Little Caesars Pizza. They currently own lots of pizza restaurants globally. They also own the Detroit Redwings, Detroit Tigers, the historic Fox Theatre and they were instrumental in the development of Comerica Park. This is a family that really has a lot of roots in Detroit and has been faithful to the city. It stands to reason that they would be one of the first to come forward and to make a big investment in the hospitality industry here.

CI: What’s involved in your recent development?
GS: The rooms opened at the end of November 2007. The entire project is a $300 million expansion of our existing facility. It is basically developed around the facility that was opened in 1999, which was expected to be the interim facility while the city negotiated the acquisition of the land down at a proposed riverfront site. That never happened so in the years of litigation that happened the project was put on hold until the city could resolve those issues. As it happened the city was unable to acquire the land so they said, ‘you’re on your own’. As a result we have decided to stay in our current location where we will put together 23 acres over the years.
The building we are in has an interesting history, it was built by a German in 1916, an immigrant named Walter W. Ahlschlager who had built some pretty notable projects such as the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, and in this particular case he had built a building called the Wagner Bakery. When we went to do the expansion we decided to include the history. A lot of senior citizens remember going on field trips as students to the Wagner Bakery, so we decided to do a project that morphed the original into our current design. We were able to acquire the original blueprints so we could do one hundred per cent restoration of the intricate terracotta and brickwork that was done. This then morphed into a project that has elements of automotive design from a gentleman called Chip Foose; he hosts a TV series called Overhaulin’ and is currently the foremost custom car designer in the United States.
We’ve taken that core of the building and expanded in all directions; that encompasses 60,000 square feet of gaming area, with the addition of a 400-room 17-story hotel tower, 67,000 square feet of meeting and banquet space, a 1200-seat theatre, additional restaurants and the remodeling of the existing casino.
The casino expansion which opened in June 2007 was the first phase, the hotel was the second phase and the project will complete with the opening of the theater later this year. The casino expansion was the first introduction of some of the new technologies that we are bringing into the industry. The casino has been highly involved in forms of bonusing that we pioneered in the 1990’s as a member of Mandalay Resort Group Property (which we split from in 2005). As a result, we developed a lot of expertise in that area. In addition we are the only casino in the country that has implemented a paperless form of cashless gaming called ‘Wager Account Transfer’. This allows for directional transfer of credits to and from an account that the customer maintains, which includes their normal players club loyalty points., This technology allows them to put money on deposit and transfer money from the slot machine back to their account. We have done this is conjunction with ‘Acres Gaming’ which is now owned by IGT, which is done with the IGT Advantage system currently.
What we experienced is that as you move the cash source and as you move to these automated cash forms of bonusing, you could inadvertently create a rather sterile, tactile experience where you don’t touch the money, handle the cash, or hear the money drop in the tray. So we were very focused on developing the technologies to enhance the winning experience. We integrated our sound system, the video distribution and the lighting controls into our ethernet network, and now we can distribute all of the video, audio and lighting in the ceilings and on all the slot signs through the network. And all of that is connected to our bonusing systems and all other systems. So the ceiling colour could change as we change all of the slot signs to a bonus scenario. There’s sub woofers installed in all the slot cabinets so we have mid range and high frequency drivers, meaning that the sound system is probably the best in any casino in the country. So when we have a bonus go up we can create the same level of energy for a jackpot as when the coins would be spilling out onto the floor – we have the 21st century equivalent of that.
We have wireless microphones whereby the system actually detects the location of a win and will put your voice over the location of the zone and blank out the background music for that zone only. If you walk to another zone, it will repeat that process wherever you go within the casino. We have gigantic VU meters as they would use in recording studios, in our Radio Bar, that are associated with our radio broadcasts that can track with the sound system or the radio broadcast. So it really is a multi-sensory experience. We think we’ve done a good job.
All the signs for example are controlled with a protocol called DMX, which the theater industry uses for lighting systems, also fog machines, lasers, cyber lights, studio colours and studio spots. This was all done within the expansion and is now live, it will also be changed in the pre-existing part of the casino.
We have over 200 video displays in the expansion area, each one actually has an IP address so I can put any image I want on just a specific site or all of the displays in the area. If we want to do a live broadcast we can also use those screens and then immediately turn it back to the advertising screen footage after.

CI: How does that work?
GS: We have a device called an SDI converter and basically the ethernet RJ45 cable plugs into the device and then the device provides the signal out to the display. That’s what converts the ethernet protocol to video. We have engaged in a licensing agreement with G-Force who are known for screen savers. Their servers monitor different channels of our audio system and they provide specific visualizations for those channels. So we can reroute individual displays to suit the music.

CI: What’s the size of your gaming floor?
GS: In Detroit there is a city-defined calculation for the total permissible expansion for a gaming area, we are allowed plus or minus ten percent to every 1,000 square feet of net gaming area. So in our case that works out to 145,000 square feet of gross gaming area. This does not include bars and restaurants etc. We have more gaming area than most of the Vegas casinos.

CI: Is it hard to run such a technologically advanced casino?
GS: Previously I ran six of Mandalay’s properties and did the structure for all 16 properties so I understand the technology. We have prided ourselves on taking new technology and making it work for us. If it all runs perfectly you don’t have to know anything about technology, but invariably things seldom go perfectly.
I was also the Chairman of the Gaming Standards Association for five years. GSA is a very technical organization so you don’t hang around with those guys as much as I have without absorbing something over the years.

CI: It sounds like your ethernet setup has server-based gaming in mind. Is that the direction you’re going in?
GS: Currently you can only operate what you can get approved by the regulators, so at the moment no server-based gaming is approved in the state of Michigan. In the re-modeling we are pulling the Cat6 out to all the slot banks so we are in a position to operate it when it becomes available. The implementation of downloadable server-based gaming is a little bit ahead of the curve in that the operators long ago defined a base they thought was essential to the growth of the industry and the manufacturers and operators have been working together through GSA to try to develop these protocols. What started out a BOB – which was the ‘Best of Breed’ protocol – ultimately evolved into the G2S standard, which is the protocol that will allow for server-based gaming in the US.
The problem is that somewhere along the way people forgot why it was that we were wanting to do it in the first place, so what you’re seeing right now in our industry is that the operators are completely enthusiastic about what they’d seen from the manufacturers so far but that server-based gaming does nothing for the operator. Many of the operators are completely against changing certain percentages on the fly, in that it could become a major issue in consumer confidence and many of the operators at the slot director level are already in possession of the adequate information and they need to make a decision whether to change the whole percent of a game or a tenth of one percent.
A lot of operators are positioning themselves to be ready but we’re sitting here waiting for the real killer application, which we haven’t really seen yet. If server-based gaming is solely a vehicle to which the manufacturer can obsolete our equipment then we’re not going to be in favour of that. If it does something for our customer that we can’t do now then we have something to talk about. But we are future proof.

CI: What’s next for the casino, then?
GS: We are very proud of what we’ve done and we still have other things in the works. For example, our theater is going to include a recording studio built in so that bands can perform, record and stay at our hotel. The other venues are also interesting; Iridescence, our award-winning fine dining restaurant, and Amnesia, our ultra lounge, will open on the top floor of the hotel with has a 40-foot wall of glass with an unparalleled view overlooking the Detroit River and Canada made possible by a 40-foot wall of glass.
The exterior of our hotel tower is covered by a product from Color Kinetics called a light pipe, so there are horizontal four-inch tubes the width of the tower that can produce 16million colors and are fully DMX controlled so we can actually sequence the color of the whole 17-storey tower, so we can be red, white and blue on the Fourth of July or whatever we want to do.

CI: What are the hotel rooms like?
GS: The rooms in our hotel are definitely a cut above. We have taken the nicest rooms from the Mandalay and made ours above those. The standard rooms in the tower have a separate shower and a separate bath and all other technologies. At check in, the clerk will ask you what temperature you want your room and the room will be that temperature by the time you get upstairs. The system actually speaks to the thermostat, the door lock, the mini bar, the Voice Over IP telephone network and the video distribution system are all integrated. The sensors will detect if there is someone in the room so the housekeeper can press a button on the room lock to see occupancy and go to another room to clean. You can also take your room telephone, as it’s cordless, out of the room and receive calls all over our property – it’s what we call a DID line that’s assigned to every customer. The list goes on; we have a pillow library so if you don’t find our normal pillows to your liking we will afford you another.

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