Does Pearl River Resort know how to win over guests?

You bet!

As the South's first all-encompassing luxury resort, Pearl River Resort attracts guests from across the United States. With features that include casinos, restaurants, live entertainment, championship golf courses, a luxury spa and a family water park, the popular resort offers a wide range of accommodations and entertainment options.

Customer Success Video

Check out this video to learn more about Pearl River Resort and its successes with SAS. 

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Customer ViewPoint
You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q& A.

Chuck Miller
President and CEO
Pearl River Resort

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John Enriquez
Vice President of Information Technology
Pearl River Resort

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Jason York
Director of Database Operations and Special Projects
Pearl River Resort

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Pearl River Resort is known for providing unsurpassed guest service, and the resort's executives know that understanding its guests is critical to meeting their needs. To help broaden that understanding, Pearl River Resort counts on insight and analysis from SAS. The resort has been amassing and assessing visitor data since its beginnings in 1994. To really stand out as leaders in this service-oriented industry, however, executives needed the predictive insights offered through SAS Customer Intelligence.

"Before using SAS, we were able to access guest information and identify who our guests were, but it took us so long to get to the information that we couldn't use it to make timely decisions," explains Chuck Miller, president and CEO of Pearl River.

Laser-focused marketing
Today's gaming enthusiasts and family vacationers have many travel options. As those options for gaming entertainment continue to grow, it becomes more and more important for casino operators to know who their guests are and what compels them to choose their resort. "The heart of this casino is marketing," says John Enriquez, Pearl River's vice president of information technology. "To survive in this industry, you have to continue to bring in the guests. Marketing excellence is essential."

Enriquez predicts the future of the casino and hospitality business will depend on guest intelligence. "As the competition continues to increase, the only way we can set ourselves apart is to know more about our guests than the competitor. SAS allows me to understand our guests, to know who they are, where they're coming from, why they're here, what their likes and dislikes are. That insight offers an incredible advantage," says Enriquez.

SAS helps Pearl River Resort consolidate its vast visitor data into a clear picture of guest profiles and market segments, giving resort executives the ability to manage timely, personalized customer communication strategies.

"SAS allows us to get to guest information in a timely sense," says Miller. "What used to take weeks to accomplish can now be accessed within hours. It also allows us to dig into our database and establish informative guest profiles. Then, once we've identified our guests and know their profiles, we can market directly to them. That takes us out of the shotgun approach to marketing and into a more laser-focused marketing method."

Winning customer connections
Data sources fed into the SAS solution include gaming transaction data, guest demographic data and point-of-sale data from non-gaming activities, including purchases at the resort's hotel, golf course, water park and restaurants. The Pearl River Rewards program, which offers a tiered system of discounts and perks for registered guests, is also used to collect visitor data.

Jason York, Pearl River Resort's director of database operations and special projects, explains how SAS helps make sense of this data. "Before we had SAS, we were working with many different transactional databases, which were very good at handling the day-to-day tracking of what's going on with the guests. But they weren't very good at allowing us to do advanced analysis about our guests.

"SAS has allowed us to combine a lot of this information that existed in many different systems and understand where the connections are," continues York. "Now we know not only what our guests are doing on the gaming floor but also what they're doing in the restaurants and what are they're doing on the golf course and at the water park. It helps us get a much better view of our guests, rather looking at a guest one way in one system and another way within another system."

With this insight, York says, SAS has increased the resort's ability to test new marketing programs and to adopt new marketing strategies that offer improved success rates. "Prior to having SAS, we were marketing on a much broader level. We were segmenting based on geography, age and guest values within specific time frames. We also segmented visitors based upon recency and frequency. SAS has allowed us to become more sophisticated with that segmentation. SAS translates and processes our guest information into marketing intelligence."

Guests and the community also win with SAS
With SAS, Miller says, the resort isn't the only winner. Pearl River Resort guests win, too: "If I'm doing marketing that's effective, what I'm literally doing is giving the guests what they're asking us for. And whenever I give the guest what they're asking for, they definitely win."

And the community wins as well. Rural Neshoba County, where the resort is located, was once one of the country's most economically depressed areas. Today, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians successfully operates the gaming resort in addition to many other industrial and recreational enterprises.

Chief Philip Martin has overseen the transformation of the area for more than 45 years, and he looks forward to SAS' continued role in the resort's successful operations. "One of the ways that we're going to improve our casino operation is by bringing technology into it," says Martin. "Under the SAS program, I believe we're going to get the kind of information that we need to better serve our guest and to become more efficient as well, which should increase our bottom line."

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