‘Gamblers’ Specials’ Date to 1950s Champagne Junkets to Vegas

The ill-fated Galaxy Airlines charter flight that crashed near Reno Monday was part of a profitable casino tradition of “gamblers’ specials” that have carried millions of hopeful bettors to Nevada for nearly three decades.

Such charter flights, which brought more than 1.5 million visitors to Las Vegas and Reno last year, were pioneered in Las Vegas in the mid-1950s by Warren (Doc) Bayley, owner of the Hacienda Hotel, said Don Payne, manager of the Las Vegas News Bureau, the city’s publicity agency.

“It all started with the old champagne flights,” Payne said. “Doc Bayley used to fly people in early in the evenings on a plane with a piano on board, give them champagne and fly them back early the next morning.”

The first gamblers’ specials flew Los Angeles-area residents into Las Vegas for free in exchange for pledges by the Californians to gamble at Bayley’s casino. By the time Bayley died in 1964, the Hacienda had acquired a fleet of 34 planes that flew more than 70 flights a week into Las Vegas from cities throughout the country.

The idea was quickly imitated by other strip casinos. Eventually, however, the junkets became less common because those who took advantage of the flights often did not gamble enough money to make them cost-effective, Payne said.

Many top casinos still offer private jet service, huge lines of credit and free hotel rooms to a select number of their favorite high rollers, however.

Today, most such junket flights have been replaced by a multiplicity of package tours in which gamblers buy brief vacations at cut-rate costs through both charter airlines and regularly scheduled commercial airlines.

One such flight was the Galaxy charter that crashed.

Sharon Zadar, spokesman for Caesars Tahoe Resort Hotel, which chartered the flight, said the package tour was typical of many being offered by Nevada casinos.

She said an independent agent in Minnesota gathered a group of passengers who paid $119 each for a round-trip flight. In return for the agent’s choosing to take his group to Caesars Tahoe, the casino chartered the airplane at no cost to the agent.

“Any further complimentary services to the guests were determined by their play,” Zadar explained. “Appointed casino personnel would monitor their play. The longer they played, on a sliding scale, the more would be comped (provided without charge), ranging from their room to everything.”

Details of such promotional arrangements are closely guarded by casinos.

Similar promotions by other casinos offer Super Bowl parties with football stars, special poker and blackjack tournaments, dinner shows, ski lift tickets and holiday gimmicks.

So large are the gambling profits casinos make, that hotels routinely offer rooms for as low as $10 a night per person.

Charter flights fly in more than 10% of the visitors who fly into the Reno-Lake Tahoe area and about 4% of those flying into Las Vegas, officials said.

Although chartered packages declined during the recession in 1979, according to Rossi Ralenkotter of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, “charters are back into a growth situation, and we expect that growth to continue.”