In the five years I’ve been writing about casinos, I’ve spent a lot of time sharing my tips with comps. One of the tips that I sometimes get pushback on is the idea of double booking.
It’s a particularly Las Vegas option in most cases (although it might make sense in other markets with many casinos like Atlantic City), but the idea is you book two hotel rooms concurrently so you can leverage the comps attached to that booking. It’s effectively a form of offer stacking, just across multiple companies.
In Las Vegas particularly, many casinos won’t give you access to free play without booking a room. But you may already have a room, so double booking means you’ll have a room you probably don’t need.
I’m not the only one – a third of you polled on the Brian Christopher Slots YouTube page have booked a hotel room just to capture other compes.
Sometimes I’ll find a way to make it functional. When I was a remote employee, I would overlap stays so I didn’t have to check out and transfer rooms in the middle of my work day. So I’d have a room overlap with another for a night so I could finish my work day before heading to the next hotel to check in.
But there are times when I book a room not for the purposes of staying there, but just to unlock free play and food. This is especially helpful if I’m overlapping two smaller offers to fill a day better and have more food available. This is a more viable option if you have access to a car (whether your own car or a rental), since you can also incorporate off-strip or downtown properties at the same time.
But occasionally I get player pushback, saying I’m taking up rooms others would want or have access to, and that you only need one room at a time. This is true, but I also earned the offers casinos are demanding be linked to a room, and I still play at the places that I book, so they’re getting their money’s worth at the same time.
If you’re a player with multiple offers to tap in Las Vegas, you know that you have to have comps at multiple places because casinos cap how many you can use at a time, and require gaps between stays. But when you have more than you need, you can safely layer offers, particularly for ones that aren’t as mission critical for your visits.
Comps have a shelf life – casinos that haven’t heard from you for awhile will eliminate them, and you can only use so many at a time. Layering allows you to get more clever, and use it to fill critical gaps in your Vegas schedule where more food or free play could be helpful.
