Penn National CEO: high spend per visit, visitation still below non-pandemic levels

Penn National Gaming CEO Jay Snowden said Tuesday the company is seeing a strong recovery at its properties as Covid-19 vaccines are making people feel more comfortable returning to casinos.

In an interview with CNBC, he said the company is seeing revenues and volumes that "I haven’t seen in years. The month of March has been incredible.” 

Penn National has 41 gaming and racetrack properties in 19 states. After facing casino closures in the early days of the coronavirus, Snowden said the reopening in the spring and summer of 2020 proved to be mixed, as attendance was low compared to non-pandemic levels, but there was a "really high spend per visit." The visitation was still way down year over year because those who were 65-plus years old weren’t coming back, Snowden said.

Growing vaccination rates in the U.S. are seen as key to helping the economy continue to bounce back from its pandemic-induced recession, allowing for people to resume activities that they otherwise shied away from during the health crisis. Snowden said Penn National is observing those effects. 

“What we’re seeing now is the spend per visit was still much higher than it was pre-Covid, but visitation levels now in the month of March look a lot like they did in 2019, so you have those two things working together,” he said. “We had one of the biggest weekends this last weekend that we have seen in years.”

Penn National has a partnership with Barstool Sports to offer the Barstool Sportsbook app, enabling online betting in three states so far (Pennsylvania, Michigan and, most recently, Illinois), with hopes of launching in more states this year. Snowden said there’s been a lot of interest in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, known as March Madness, which has seen a lot of bracket-busting upsets in the early rounds.

“All the wagers that took place on Super Bowl, we almost surpassed that amount in Pennsylvania and Michigan ... on the first day of March Madness,” Snowden said. “We blew past, almost doubled, what we saw for Super Bowl within the first two days of March Madness.”