What a week of gambling news! Las Vegas casinos are vaccinating their employees while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reducing travel restrictions for those already vaccinated. Plus, there is now talk of a Vegas Health Passport for visiting Sin City! Hello friends, and welcome to This Week in Gambling! I hope everyone out there had a wonderful Easter weekend, and congratulations to the Baylor Bears on their NCAA Men’s National Basketball Championship! And with that out of the way, it’s time for this week’s big story! During this pandemic, casinos in both Atlantic City and Las Vegas…

America is slowly emerging from lock-down, and that could be great news for Vegas and the state of Nevada. The Center for Disease Control has eased some of their travel restrictions, and things are looking better for vacation destinations… such as Sin City. Having warned citizens not to travel unless necessary, a new directive from the CDC allows those who are vaccinated to travel within the United States, but warned people that they still need to wear a mask and practice social distancing. This is really fantastic news for vacation cities like Las Vegas… even as we collectively hold our…

Nevada casinos were recently allowed to raise occupancy levels from 25% to 35%… and then to 50%. But if they want to get back to full occupancy, they will need to encourage their employees to get vaccinated. The state Gaming Control Board released a memo recently which encourages casinos in the state to provide paid time off so that workers can receive their Coronavirus vaccination, and to coordinate transportation for them to vaccination sites. That memo also points out that the state’s hospitality workers have a low degree of vaccination penetration, even though some companies have been proactively encourage their…

This is no April Fools joke. Reviv Global has announced the launch of their Heliix Health Passport… what some are calling a ‘health passport‘… which works in conjunction with their testing facilities located in Las Vegas. Those facilities are located in the MGM Grand, The Cosmopolitan, and The Venetian. The Heliix Health Passport is a mobile app, and after testing the results are sent directly to the users device using VCode, an end-to-end encryption to prevent hacks and data breaches. That VCode can then be used to verify test results and grant access to restaurants, conventions, nightclubs, shows and other…

After spending over a year in various forms of lock-down, there is now hope as Las Vegas returns to normal. However, as the tourists begin to make their way back to Nevada, there are some things to keep in mind. First, the fantastic room rates that resorts have been offering during the pandemic will soon disappear as the masses flock to Sin City. Still, the rates will simply return to be closer to what they were before the world shut down. You can probably count on airfare heading up as well. But hey, at least we’ll be able to travel,…

We were all waiting for things to get back to normal. But now, finding a Las Vegas Uber or Lyft driver is almost impossible! The tourists are returning to Sin City for sure. However, not all of the ride share drivers are ready to return to work. “They weren’t enforcing the mask mandate so passengers were getting in the cars without having to use masks and if you tell them to use masks they would rate you bad or have an attitude with you,” said Will Misdom, who works for one of the companies. If that were not enough to…