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Keen to Beat Off-Season Blues, Tourism Operators Plumbed Gambling Adjacency to Fill Slots
08 October 2026
As December set in, hoteliers, tour operators, and event planners took a hit or two when the tourism boom of '25 started to fizzle, and Arctic chill set in.
New bookings slowed for a resort in Jasper, Alberta. Winter visits offer golden nuggets of profit, yet surprisingly few directly translate deal-chasers like online prepaid cards. It became an uphill battle to grab and hang on to visitors looking for more with less enticing them.
At stake: keeping the economy moving in the short term and firmly entrenching your hotel room as the visitors' choice, over alternatives that may look more appealing when budgets are tight and travel bookings precise.
As it turns out, those grinning and spending tourists at the slots and poker tables can be a tourism operator's best friend. The promise, it turns out, has buyers.
Introducing Gambling Tourism, a novel way to keep your tourism revenue in the green, and fill those rooms as leisure demand slows. Online travel and gambling businesses have joined hands to create lucrative off-season combinations that keep visitors flowing and the local economy busy.
Gambling is Tourism's New Partner
When the urge to travel wanes, the allure of gambling carries it onward. From the casinos of Macao linking with Alipay to distribute vouchers and funnel web traffic into local spending, to Niseko hoping to attract visitors by referencing a popular video game during the warmer months, integrated cash back opportunities and shoulder-season discounts are what has operators wooing and wishing. Tourism businesses have had to let imagination lead, turning casinos into darlings and casino sites into marketing channels, in the effort to keep the momentum of the past year going.
Benefits include higher than expected occupancy, a rise in regional income from Asian and South American visitors who see off-season packages as enticing foreign investment opportunities, as well as operational financial flexibility.
Hotels that partner with the world's leading gaming operators and create included and all-in deals for visitors show, through linked promotions, that their core business is lodging, not gaming. Jasper can scale-up by bundling bookings with prepaid cards, and Niseko has poured into the season-starved world of video-game sponsorships. Promotions such as Ontario's annual 'All-in 23', for instance, offered visitors from 5 different start points to Canada everything from casino credits, to discounted travel bundles, to free gaming content, a strategy other destinations planning to woo visitors from Canada and the lower 48 have already copied.
More on this is available via odds.
It's an approach that many destinations, in provinces with gambling activity already animating their economies, would do well to follow. Even if operators offer the same number of packages as in previous years, the result may still offer major increases across the board, literally.
Something for Everyone
That's because the gambles paid off. And that bet should spur other tourism operations to follow their lead.
In Jasper, Alberta, the offseason strategy of prepaid cards as winter value-adds paid off. Reservations surged as room revenue spiked, growing from CAD 9,457 to CAD 35,680, while bookings went from 20 to 88 in a year.
The result was a destination that drew more visitors. Medium-sized crowds putting more income into the local economy, while paying for room and board with a regional business.
It's but one of many positive outcomes. In nearby Las Vegas, Canadian visitors to its various properties rocketed 233%, from an average of 15,000 a month to 50,000, after a promotion that offered rewards for each need visitors had, whether they were right on-site, or located an hour's drive away.
Indeed, the takeaway, is that bundles work. Common tactics adopted by tourism cashflow experts are early bird tickets with reward codes that act as gaming vouchers, or coupons, used for everything from laundry to mini bar. Any provider selling off-season products, after all, is in need of something to attract buyers, and any buyer of the same will delight in a chance to stay on budget and still score free goods.
Across the board, casino and marketing relationships are an unexpected boon. All that's left to offer is a pathway for operators who wish to capture the opportunity.