Smoking Ban – Friend Or Foe For Online Bingo

I’ve just been reading a press release about the smoking ban in the UK and how this is partly responsible for the growth in online bingo. Do you think this is relevant? I certainly do but also thing a few other things have added to the demise of land bingo. Over the last year I must have written over 20 reports about land based bingo clubs closing due to the smoking ban so how exactly is this responsible?

Much of the revenue generated at land bingo halls comes from patrons playing the slot machines in the intervals but this has decreased dramatically with the introduction of the smoking in public places ban seeing many players spending the intervals outside having a cigarette. Add to this the new law governing the amount of £500 jackpot games that the land based bingo halls can have and revenue was bound to slide.

For the online bingo industry though this has meant big business because people can pretty much do as they please in their own homes. They can smoke their heads off whilst playing bingo if they so wish meaning more and more players are switching on their PC’s for a game of bingo.

Land Bingo used to hold one bonus for me and that was the fact that you knew that you were playing against other players with the same amount of tickets as you, no one person could buy more than a set of six tickets but this changed recently with the introduction of electronic bingo games. So like as with many online bingo sites you are playing against people who potentially have a bigger bingo budget than yourselves. What does land bingo offer now that online bingo doesn’t?

In all honesty I can’t see anything unique about land bingo now other than the face to face interaction with staff and players at a bingo hall, even that you can get at online bingo by using the chat rooms. Are we going to see the end of land bingo? I don’t think so, I just foresee it getting back the image of the blue rinse brigade that it has worked so hard to shake off and only because many of the older generation aren’t interested in the internet or computers.

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