Did More Gambling Improve My MGM Offers?

Series: MGM Rewards Comping Behavior
A running record of how MGM prices and reprices comped stays.
Start here: Understanding MGM Rewards Comping Behavior

Last week I compared a brand-new MGM Rewards account with my long-established account. That article established a useful baseline before my recent ARIA stay had fully worked its way through MGM’s marketing system.

The latest quarterly offers have now arrived, giving us the next piece of the puzzle. After my deliberately low-gambling Bellagio stay in February, my MGM Rewards Offers gradually weakened over the following months. Bellagio dropped from four complimentary nights to three, then to two. Freeplay fell from $60 to $20, and the richer resort credits quietly disappeared.

Rather than simply wondering whether that decline would continue indefinitely, I decided to change one variable. During a recent stay at ARIA I gambled considerably more.

Not high-roller levels by any means, but materially more than during the Bellagio trip that preceded it. We also continued to charge food and beverage to the room, attended a Cirque du Soleil show booked through MGM, and generally engaged more broadly with the resort.

What I hoped to learn on the back of this:

Would increasing my gambling improve future MGM offers?

Did my ARIA trip actually involve meaningfully more gambling than Bellagio?

Given slot play involves multiple wins and losses, and cycling the same dollars over and over again, I needed a decent proxy of actual activity. Rather than estimate dollars wagered, I used MGM’s own Gaming Tier Credits as a consistent measure of casino activity.

*Reconstructed from MGM Rewards activity history.

The difference is significant. Gaming Tier Credits increased from 552 at Bellagio to 7,751 at ARIA, roughly fourteen times higher. While that’s still well below what a hosted player might generate, it represents a substantial change in my own behaviour, making the subsequent offer changes much more meaningful.

The chart below summarises every major change in my Bellagio offers since the start of this experiment.

Rather than relying on memory, I’ve now been recording every significant offer change as I check it. That has turned what started as a series of observations into something closer to a longitudinal experiment.

The timeline above shows Bellagio’s offers gradually weakening after the February trip, followed by what happened after the stronger ARIA stay.

The timeline also explains why I didn’t draw any conclusions immediately after ARIA. The first offers showed only modest improvement. It wasn’t until the next quarterly refresh that the broader recovery became visible.

One lesson from this experiment is that MGM’s offers appear to have multiple moving parts. Had I stopped after the first post-ARIA offers, I would probably have concluded the experiment had largely failed. Waiting for the next quarterly refresh produced a very different picture.

The first offers after ARIA weren’t spectacular. Bellagio still wasn’t complimentary. Neither were ARIA, Cosmopolitan or Vdara. Freeplay remained at $20.

The first offers after ARIA suggested only modest improvement. Looking more closely, accommodation pricing had improved considerably.

Bellagio dropped to around $24 per night before resort fees. ARIA fell to roughly $7. Vdara was about $15 and Cosmopolitan around $39.

The gambling incentives, however, barely moved.

Accommodation pricing appeared to be responding more quickly than the casino incentives. Pricing improved first, while Bellagio remained capped at two complimentary nights. It wasn’t until the next quarterly refresh that Bellagio returned to three complimentary nights and freeplay increased from $20 to $55.

A few days later MGM refreshed its quarterly offers.

This time I repeated the search using the same travel dates, removing one obvious alternative explanation that different hotel inventory might have been driving the earlier changes.

The new offers showed something different.

The intermediate post-ARIA observation is particularly interesting. Accommodation pricing had already improved, but Bellagio complimentary nights and freeplay didn’t recover until the following quarterly refresh.

Bellagio increased from two complimentary nights back to three. Freeplay increased from $20 to $55. Resort credits at many mid-tier properties returned from $50 to $100. Four complimentary nights also became much more common again across the rest of the portfolio.

Those aren’t simply different room prices. They appear to be changes to the structure of the offer itself.

At this point, the evidence fits that explanation better than any alternative I’ve considered. I don’t think the response was immediate. Instead, it appears the accommodation side of the offer improved first, with the gambling incentives following during the next quarterly marketing refresh.

That still doesn’t prove cause and effect. MGM almost certainly evaluates many different variables simultaneously, and one account can never isolate every factor. But the evidence now fits the original hypothesis much better than it did a week ago.

The offers haven’t fully returned to where they once were. Earlier in the year Bellagio offered four complimentary nights together with $60 freeplay and $100 resort credit. Today’s offers remain below that level.

MGM is clearly considering more than one variable, and future observations may reveal whether factors such as promotional engagement or Tier Credit challenges also influence offers.

The timing of this update is useful for another reason. In my previous article I introduced a brand-new MGM Rewards account with almost no gambling history as a control account.

That account now becomes an important reference point.

If the control account begins receiving similar improvements despite almost no gambling activity, I’ll need to rethink how much credit I give the stronger ARIA session. If it doesn’t, the evidence that gambling influenced my established account becomes considerably stronger.

When I left ARIA, I hoped the increased gambling would eventually improve my offers. The first set of offers suggested only modest progress.

The quarterly refresh told a different story. Bellagio recovered from two complimentary nights to three. Freeplay increased from $20 to $55. Resort credits strengthened across much of the portfolio.

None of that proves the ARIA stay caused the improvement. But compared with where the evidence stood a week ago, it’s now a much more convincing explanation.

The experiment isn’t over. If anything, it’s becoming more interesting.