Featured Editorials

Women in senior roles across Ambassadeurs Group and beyond are helping push the gambling industry forwards

When it comes to diversity, Les Ambassadeurs Club has been pushing barriers for many years. Across the Ambassadeurs Group (AG), which includes the prestigious club in London’s Mayfair, 45 nationalities are represented and some 37 languages are spoken among the 311 staff. Of the total team some 136 are women and many of the senior management – including gaming director and the dead of business development – are female.

As Atlantic City’s Borgata heads toward a milestone anniversary, President Travis Lunn sets a course for the future. By David McKee

Twenty years ago, Atlantic City got a wake-up call. It had evolved – or perhaps devolved – into a sleepy, even stagnant gambling market. Steve Wynn had fled and Donald Trump talked big but did nothing. Then came Borgata, a collaboration between Boyd Gaming and the company then known as MGM Mirage. It opened at 11:50 p.m. on July 2, 2003 with an inaugural roll of the dice on a craps table by actor Stephen Dorff. (Whatever became of him?) Nothing was ever the same. Borgata immediately leapt to the forefront of Atlantic City and grew the market. Over the years, some things have come and gone at the resort, including Boyd’s ownership share (which it invested into growth in other cities) but MGM, now MGM Resorts International, has been a constant.

Gaming and giving back is proving to be a winning formula for the iconic Mayfair casino

Until 2020 the world of the ultra-high-net-worth was predictable. UK summers were all about visitors packing London’s high end hotels, eating in the best restaurants, shopping in department stores such as Harrods and Selfridges, and – for the privileged few – gaming in casinos such as Les Ambassadeurs Club in London’s Mayfair.

Fast forward to 2022 and the post-Covid world looks very different. Overseas visitors are returning, but in a less predictable pattern overall. According to VisitBritain, UK visits overall for 2022 will rise to 26.7 million this year, pushing spending to £21.6 billion – but still down around 30 percent on 2019 levels. The VisitBritain estimate for summer 2022 visitor was recovery to two-thirds of pre-Covid levels.

CEO Michael Silberling brings a cosmopolitan experience to Metropolitan Gaming. By David McKee

For a new company looking to make an impression on the international stage, Metropolitan Gaming could hardly have chosen better than to tap Michael Silberling as its CEO. Not only is he vastly experienced in operations around the world, he is intimately familiar with Caesars Entertainment, from whose empire Silver Point Capital snapped up a far-flung portfolio of assets to form Metropolitan, reaching from the banks of the Nile to the snows of Glasgow.