• October 2026Greetings all, and welcome to The Mixer. We’re in the fourth quarter, and preparing for IMEX in a big way. (We’ll have a presence there, in print form!)
This month, we’re diving into a related field that has some parallels to modern conferences, but diverges in notable ways: The casino. Both, to varying degrees, rely on the psychology of their target audiences, but how many parallels are there, really?
Other insights worth checking out this time:
🌴 Business travelers & bleisure
✈️ The return of gateside access
💸 Can you tempt attendees with money?
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Alright, let’s get to it:
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Can Casinos Teach Event Planners Any Design Tricks?
Whether it’s the opulent design or the feeling you’re walking through a maze, casinos have a certain psychological approach that event planners might find attractive in some cases. (But not every case.)
What happens in Vegas is dominated by spectacle. The trade show floors hit you with scale; the casinos hit you with the bright lights of the slot machine.
What is it about casinos and events that make them mesh together so well in a hospitality environment? One factor, at least in Las Vegas, might come down to the host city’s infrastructure.
“It didn’t grow organically as we see in other cities that we have spots here and there, where you have to go all over the city to get a little bit of this and a little bit of that,” says Juliana Rodrigues Vieira Tkatch, an assistant professor in residence at the UNLV William F. Harrah College of Hospitality. “In Las Vegas, it was planned to be in the strip—so you have one avenue where you can find everything.”
There’s a certain philosophy that comes with casinos. Think a lack of mirrors, a maze-like layout, a design that moves the busier games away from the quieter ones. Events have a certain design philosophy, too, one focused on high-touch interactions and a constant flow of attendees. But the area where both mesh is with an effective design, an area that IMEX emphasizes with the help of interaction designer Oliver Bailey.
“Design isn’t an activity; it’s a state of mind,” he says. “It’s a way of interacting and perceiving the world. It provides purpose and direction and places people at the center.”
With design a key talking point of IMEX this year, we decided to look at casino design and event design and figure out where they might fit together, and where taking a lesson or two from a Vegas casino might prove worth a gamble.
Read on to learn where you should (and shouldn’t) be taking notes.
We’re At IMEX!
Stop by EventMobi at Booth B4896 and pick up the print edition of The Mixer!
Is all this talk about casinos making you think about what that approach can bring to your events? Check out these links for a few ideas:
» Curious about casino psychology? A lengthy piece from Casino Reports breaks down the decisions that drive modern casino design.
» About those windows … you might have heard that casinos in Vegas don’t have windows to hide the loss of time. But Mental Floss explains that the truth is more complicated.
» How tradeshows game: Gamification is the lifeblood of many conferences. How can you make it work for your event? Check out EventMobi’s guide to gamification for association events.
More Than
Before ✈️
Road warriors get back into the swing of business travel, and then some.
37%
The percentage of business travelers who say they’re traveling more than they were before the pandemic, according to a study of 2,000 travelers by Hotels.com. On average, travelers spend 10 nights per year on the road for business, and nearly two-thirds tend to favor locations that allow room for bleisure.
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(Giorgio Trovato/Unsplash)
What if your goal is to lower the odds that potential attendees might skip out on your big event?
A recent idea from the world of tech might offer just the solution to that problem, and it involved more than a few instant refunds.
The tech firm 37signals, best known for its collaboration software Basecamp, was attempting to get some customers to appear at a company event, but rather than offering free attendance, the company charged $100. If those attendees showed up, they got $100 directly back in their pocket in the form of $100 bills. That created a built-in incentive structure and psychological encouragement to ensure that people attended the event.
“We did this because we thought it would drastically increase attendance, which it did,” founder Jason Fried told Skift Meetings. The resulting approach, which came with an air of novelty, had a 90% show rate. While fewer people signed up than the company usually gets, the ones that did sign up actually made it to the event.
If you’ve got a sparsely attended webinar or event, think your attendees might go for an approach like this one?
That’s where the event sector stands this month. Keep an eye on where we’re headed—and be sure to share this link with your favorite reader: