It’s official, Swiss bettors can now go to Kursaal Bern casino website to place their bets. Their official online gaming site has just been launched. The site works much like Malaysia’s online gambling application, 918kiss. It provides bettors with various game ranges and is thus part of a digital strategy that ultimately represents a lifeline in the face of restrictions due to the COVID-19 health crisis.
Digitization imposed by the implications of COVID-19
The Swiss Grand Casino Bern de Kursaal has just officially launched its online gaming site. This initiative is a commercial strategy for the company to establish an online presence and limit the economic damage linked to the Covid-19 health crisis. This crisis notably imposed restrictions on the opening hours of the facility and has limited the number of players they can accommodate. Consequently, this led to a drastic drop in revenue.
Under these conditions and realizing the dangers it could bring to the business, creating an online presence through its online gaming site proved to be crucial in resisting the crisis. Moreover, a large part of Kursaal Bern’s target clientele (young gamblers) has a preference for online games. So things will certainly not stop there, since the owners of the Grand Casino Kursaal Bern are also thinking of diversifying their offers on their land-based casino.
The Grand Casino Bern is among the properties of the Austria International casino group. It is the second of the group to go digital, since the Interlaken casino of the same group has already been following this path since February 2020. From a regulatory point of view, the online gaming site launched by Kursaal Bern will operate legally, thanks to the license held by the operator since 2019.
Scary figures
For Swiss land-based casinos, launching online casino games could help them recover in this period of crisis which will surely make big holes in their budgets and revenues.
Indeed, the official figures that are mentioned in the online gambling sector seem very promising, which should encourage lagging land-based casino operators to also go digital, especially since the results of operators terrestrial are quite deplorable. For example, the country’s gambling regulatory commission – the Eidgenössischen Spielbankenkommission – said in a recent press release that the gambling sector in Switzerland generated revenues of CHF 23.5 million, i.e. just over 21 million euros in 2019.
Meanwhile, casino operators like Casinos Austria International which holds numerous land-based casinos in the country reported to have incurred losses of roughly 52.8 million euros just in the first half of 2020, a 30% drop in the overall income of the firm.