I have too many apps.
I have apps for airlines, hotels, restaurants, coffee, parking, workouts, grocery stores, schools, sports teams, and at least one youth sports organization that apparently believes managing a child’s schedule requires enterprise software.
Every business I encounter now looks at my phone and thinks: You know what she needs? Us. Permanently.
Casino and resort marketing has enthusiastically joined this movement.
Download the app to access your offers. Download the app to see your points. Download the app to book the room. Download the app to make a reservation. Download the app to order food. Download the app to get your digital room key. Download the app to find out what time the pool closes.
At some point, I would simply like to go somewhere.
I understand why marketers love apps. I really do. They give us a direct line to the customer. We can send push notifications, personalize offers, track behavior, encourage repeat visits, and keep the brand sitting right there on someone’s home screen instead of hoping they remember we exist. From the business side, it’s beautiful.
From the customer side, I’m standing in a lobby trying to remember whether I signed up with Gmail or Apple while being informed that my password needs eight characters, a capital letter, a number, and apparently some evidence that I have suffered enough.
There is a point where convenience becomes homework and I think we should probably figure out where that point is.
Congratulations, you’ve assigned me homework
The best apps remove friction. Airline apps are probably the easiest example. I use them constantly, because they hold something I genuinely need: my boarding pass. They tell me when my gate changes. I can change my seat. I can see where my bag is, information I didn’t know I needed emotionally until someone started providing it. That app has earned its little square of real estate on my phone.
The same can absolutely be true for a casino or resort app. If I can see my offers, book a room, make dinner reservations, check my tier status, and figure out what’s happening on property without wandering around looking for someone wearing a name tag, fantastic. Keep the app.
The problem starts when we aren’t removing steps. We’re just relocating them onto the customer.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that because something can be done digitally, it must be easier. Scan this. Download that. Create an account. Verify your email. Enable notifications. Allow location services. Accept the terms and conditions that absolutely no living person has read.
Congratulations. You may now have your cocktail.
Technology was supposed to make hospitality easier. Occasionally, it feels like we’ve made the guest an unpaid member of the operations team.
This is getting clingy
There’s also a slightly uncomfortable marketing truth here: Most customers do not want the same level of relationship with our brands that we want with them.
We would like an ongoing relationship. They may just want dinner.
We would like permission to communicate directly with them for the foreseeable future. They would like to park their car.
We would like them to enable push notifications so we can deliver relevant personalized communications based on their preferences. They’re trying to find the pool.
That doesn’t mean customers don’t want to engage with brands. It means the exchange has to make sense.
Downloading one app is a tiny request. Collectively, modern life has turned it into death by a thousand tiny requests. My phone currently contains an entire civilization of brands patiently waiting for me to return. Some have not heard from me since 2023. I think they know what happened.
Make me want it
Which is why I think we may be asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how we get more people to download the app, ask why they would want to keep it.
One can be solved with a QR code. The other requires the app to be useful.
Maybe it gives me genuinely better access to my offers. Maybe it helps me navigate a massive resort. Maybe it remembers my preferences. Maybe I can join a restaurant waitlist from the casino floor, see when my room is ready, or find my car, which I would personally consider a public service in certain Las Vegas parking garages.
There are plenty of ways an app can make a casino experience better. But the value has to belong to the customer, too. Otherwise, we’ve built a very sophisticated piece of technology that primarily makes our own marketing department happy.
Can I just be a guest?
Casinos should be particularly good at understanding this, because the industry has spent decades learning how to recognize customers. Hosts know their players. Bartenders remember drinks. Dealers remember faces. Great properties make people feel like somebody noticed they came back.
Technology should make us better at that. It shouldn’t replace it with a login screen.
So yes, build the app. Make it useful. Make it fast. Give me something I couldn’t get as easily without it.
Just remember that somewhere on the other side of your download conversion metric is a person staring at her phone thinking: I swear to God, if I have to create one more account …
