Shreveport-Bossier City: Riverboat Gaming's Sure Bet

Anyone who's been to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas might get a strange sense of déjà vu stepping into the Eldorado Resort Casino on the Shreveport side of the Red River across from Bossier City in northern Louisiana.

The Eldorado, like the MGM Grand, has an art deco motif accented by fluted columns and Italian marble floors, giving it an old-Hollywood feel.

“We like to call it casual elegance,” said Leslie Peck, Eldorado's spokeswoman.

Although dwarfed in size by the typical Las Vegas casino, the Eldorado does boast three floors of gaming – on a fully operational riverboat – including slot machines and table games, such as blackjack and craps. It also has a 403-room attached hotel.

Also similar to Sin City's casino-hotels, the Eldorado and four other riverboat properties in the area are a big draw for the meeting and convention business.

“I think it's because they are so resort-like,” Peck said. “They have dining, casino entertainment, nightlife and the hotel, so it's pretty self-contained.”

The Eldorado does a decent group business, she added, but because its meeting space is somewhat small, 6,240 square feet, other nearby casinos attract the bigger groups.

Mary Cornetta, president-elect of the Louisiana Dietetic Assn., was looking around for someplace new to hold her organization's annual meeting and tradeshow, which attracts 300 attendees and 23 exhibitors. She booked DiamondJacks Casino & Resort in Bossier City, a property with more than 20,000 sq. ft. of event space.

The Food & Nutrition Convention & Expo usually rotates between Baton Rouge and Lafayette but, Cornetta said, after checking out other facilities, she decided DiamondJacks would be a good bet. “The cost and the size fit our needs,” she said.

DiamondJacks also has three floors of riverboat gaming and, though it doesn't have the same resort atmosphere as the Eldorado, its meeting space has just been renovated to give it a more modern look.

Cornetta said her organization recently started marketing the meeting, scheduled April 23-25, with the theme “Beat the Odds with Nutrition.”

She added, “There's been a lot of interest so far. We usually just have it in a Hilton, not in a casino, so this will be a different experience for us.”

DiamondJacks and the Eldorado, along with Shreveport's Sam's Town Hotel & Casino and Bossier City's Horseshoe Casino & Hotel and Boomtown Hotel & Casino, have all been a boon to the regional economy.

According to Brandy Claiborne, Shreveport-Bossier City Convention & Tourist Bureau's vice president of communications, in the mid-'80s, the oil and gas business that had been supporting the area for many years began to deteriorate.

“The economy was centered around that and, when the bottom fell out of it, this was a very dismal time to live in Shreveport,” she said. “The casinos were a lifesaver.”

Las Vegas-based Harrah's Entertainment opened the first riverboat casino in the mid-'90s. It's now Sam's Town. The Horseshoe came next, Claiborne said, with “its big glamorous hotel. Then the rest came, and they all have hotels, spas, gift shops, pools and fitness centers.”

Throw in the gaming, restaurants and well-known entertainers like Bill Cosby, The Doobie Brothers and Reba McEntire - and it's not hard to believe the casinos are a big reason group business has picked up over the years.

Another piece of the puzzle that recently fell into place was the January 2006 opening of the Shreveport Convention Center with its 146,000 sq. ft. of meeting and exhibit space and the attached 313-room Hilton Hotel Shreveport.

The center opened only a few months after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the Gulf Coast and caused the cancellation of numerous events booked at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

“There were some conventions and meetings that had never thought of us before that started coming here,” Claiborne said.

Tourism is still the biggest slice of the pie, according to Kim Brice, vice president of convention marketing at the bureau, but with the casinos and the new convention center, the area recently scored two major citywide events, one expecting 5,000 attendees and the other 2,500.

With groups of that size, the bureau works with downtown hotels and the casinos to book people into rooms, Brice added.

“We're still a very young market, but our meetings have increased 60 percent because of gaming,” she said. “Everybody has a box out there. It's what you have around the box that makes it interesting.”