Durango Casino Debuts Dialed-In High Limit Lounge
If you’re a tourist, you may never visit the off-Strip Durango Casino. They’re fine with that, as the place is slaying with locals and printing money.
Durango is one of those casinos that relies heavily on its geographical location. Station Casinos knew the area was underserved (Southwest Las Vegas, near the I-215 Beltway at Durango Drive) and they’re now serving the hell out of it.
The casino has been so successful, Durango recently unveiled a new high limit salon. When they already had one. The existing high limit room simply wasn’t big or pretty enough. This one gives guests some Strip-style fancy close to home. Let’s take a look, along with your daily dose of mansplaining, of course.
Durango Casino built a shiny new high limit room despite the fact the place is only two years old. It opened December 5, 2023.
Station Casinos put Durango in the middle of a populous, affluent suburban zone surrounded by fancy-sounding neighborhoods like Rhodes Ranch, The Lakes, The Ridges and Summerlin South. Before Durango opened, folks would have to drive 20-plus minutes to get to another Station casino or The Strip. That’s not how we Las Vegas residents roll. We need our gambling nearby. We have slot machines in our gas stations and grocery stores, after all.
Durango was a success right out of the gate, so a “Phase II” expansion was inevitable. Parts of the expansion are boring (“New parking garage!”), but high limit rooms are all the rage, so we had to check out the casino’s new lounge.
It’s hawt. And we’re not just talking about the model bartenders, because you’re not allowed to consider women attractive anymore, apparently.
Let’s just say that the model bartenders in Durango’s new high limit room have incredible personalities.
Why is that the case? Because Durango, like all Station Casinos, is non-union. That means they can hand-pick women with the best personalities to work their high limit areas without being constrained by things like seniority. If you have visited casinos where cocktail servers and others are determined by seniority, you will notice some of their personalities are 106 years old.
The quality of casino employee personalities can have a big effect on your experience.
In the case of our visit to the Durango high limit slots lounge bar, we lost approximately $600 we never would have donated to Durango Casino’s coffers if the bartenders had possessed less mesmerizing personalities. Why do you think Circa has dancing dealers? Guys gamble longer when there are women with appealing personalities present, it’s just the way things work.
Anyway, the new high limit lounge has “8,000 square feet of dedicated gaming and indoor/outdoor lounge space.” We didn’t see anything outdoors, but we’ll take them at their word.
There was a lovely seating area inside the lounge.
The lounge has 120 high-limit slot machines, “including the debut of 30 new-to-Durango titles, as well as comfortable chairs and purse stools.”
We also didn’t see any of these purse stools, but we do know they get a lot of use during NFR. People use them for their hats. We are not making this up.
Here are more words from the excellent Station Casinos blog: “The High Limit Slot Room games include the popular Dragon Link, Station Casinos’ linked progressive, with top payouts ranging from $50,000 to $1,000,000 based on bet range. New games to the room include Arctic Express, Super Hot Flaming Pots and Wolf Run Wild Moon.”
Why don’t more casinos have blogs? Because they’re idiots. It’s not all that nuanced. People hate news releases. Local news sucks. SEO is king. Blogs personalize and humanize brands, especially if they have a casual tone and provide information you can’t get anywhere else.
Yes, the Station Casinos blog could be better, especially if it used more humor and talked about things other than itself, but nobody’s perfect. Great corporate blogs are impossible. When we were doing the Pulse of Vegas blog for Caesars Entertainment, it was driving millions in room revenue (among other benefits), so they had to kill it, naturally. Deep sigh. Las Vegas casinos are a solid 15 years behind the curve when it comes to content marketing. Don’t get us started.
Anyway, more from the blog: “Guests playing in the room will receive top-notch personalized service with dedicated guest service attendants, a full-time hospitality butler, two private restrooms, and a High-Limit cage in the space to cater to guests’ needs. Additionally, players will be able to cash out quickly with ‘MyPay,’ a paperless digital system for quicker payouts.”
We didn’t see any butlers during our visit, but that sounds like a cool idea. What they would do in a high limit room, we have no idea, but foot rubs sound nice.
The aforementioned bar has 16 multi-game bartop machines. The machines start at $10 per hand for video poker, as opposed to $5 per hand at Red Rock and others.
The Durango high limit room makes an attempt at snacks, but people spending hundreds and often thousands of dollars during a session might need more than pretzels and granola bars to make an impression, sorry.
That “paperless digital system for quicker payouts” is a very useful system for high volume slot players, despite the fact there’s no such thing as a digital system involving paper as far as we know. “Paperless digital” is an oxymoron like “clearly confused,” “bittersweet” or “Criss Angel’s personality.”
Sometimes called “fast pay” or “quick pay” systems, they allow players to provide their tax information up front, so when they hit a “taxable” (formerly $1,200 or more, now $2,000 or more), they just enter a code and keep playing. They get all the tax forms for their session at the end of the night. Or morning, if they’re doing Vegas right.
Super convenient for players, devastating for slot attendants. No handpays, no tips. And that’s in addition to the increase in the taxable threshold, which is expected to eliminate 65% of all handpays. Yikes is right.
But we aren’t here for that today, we are here to give kudos to Durango for creating a beautiful new space for players to try their luck. And we don’t mean with the bartenders. That’s the longest of longshots.
Station Casinos has sort of created an arms race with high limit rooms, and other locals casinos are scrambling to keep up. Boyd Gaming and others are looking at Durango, Red Rock Casino, Green Valley Ranch, Santa Fe Station and others and upgrading their own high limit spaces as well. It’s not just a nice amenity, it’s a matter of survival in a highly competitive market.
One of the biggest trends in high limit spaces is the separation of slots and table games. They used to be smushed together, but slots players and table games players are different animals.
There’s a pretty good chance that at some point UFC is going to host a match between a slot player and a table games player. Unfortunately, UFC is on Paramount+ now, so nobody would know about it.
Station Casinos is doing it right, extracting all the things it knows work and jettisoning things that don’t. They also know their customers’ preferences inside and out.
Example: Durango already had a perfectly good high limit slot room. Nice machines, nice bar. Nice is nice, but a wow factor is better.
Why did they build a new one? They simply knew they could do better. (Plans haven’t been solidified for the existing room, but the bar is still in operation, with a nice, but lonely bartender. A guy. At Station Casinos, males can’t work as bartenders in high limit rooms, one of the few forms of discrimination we fully support. Now that the old high limit room has been decommissioned, it is fair game for everyone.)
Happy customers play more, and high limit players have lots of options in Las Vegas.
You know, sometimes mansplaining is just explaining. Start your own blog if you don’t like it.
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