Horse racing bettors, who are customers of Ladbrokes or Coral, are set to receive a welcome boost as the two firms extend the popular best odds guaranteed (BOG) offer to shop patrons. The promotion ensures that if a horse’s price increases since you placed the bet, you will receive the higher starting price. The best odds guaranteed offer is so popular online that you will struggle to find any online betting site offering horseracing that doesn’t feature it.
In a clever marketing tactic, customers will only be able to benefit from the promotion if they hold a Ladbrokes Grid or Coral Connect card. The companies, who are both part of the GVC Holdings group, plan a full marketing campaign to ensure public awareness.
The industry as a whole is under huge pressure to not only find new sources of revenue but to also maximise existing revenue streams. High street bookmakers are warning investors that the FOBT maximum stake cut from £100 to £2 will hit profits hard, with the fixed odds betting terminals presently providing the lion’s share of income. Online gambling providers do not escape impending changes, with an increase in the taxation from income raising from 15% to 21%. Although this change will take effect from October rather than April when the FOBT stake rules come into law.
GVC had warned that the reduction in the FOBT stake would be disastrous and predicted that they would have to close 1,000 retail shops across its brands. This announcement to bring a well-known idea to boost footfall is a sign of an operator fighting back, a move that the firm’s PR director Simon Clare was keen to herald. He said
We are now taking pre-emptive action with the launch of this significant betting shop offer, which will boost our horseracing business and also our betting shop footfall as we prepare for the challenge ahead.–Simon Clare, GVC PR director.
Clare went on to say that the introduction of the best odds guaranteed offer is the biggest event ever to hit the high street and boosts the company’s horseracing business. He outlined how important horseracing was for the core business. He shared his belief that retail bookmakers will become sports betting hubs, offering a vibrant and social environment where customers will “come to watch live sport and enjoy a flutter, and horseracing will be the most important sport of them all within this vision of the future”.
He believes that by offering the best odds guaranteed in the shops, it will remove a major disincentive to bet in store rather than online and he believes this change will have an immediate effect.
While GVC’s decision to offer best odds guaranteed affects the largest number of customers, they are not the first to offer the promotion. Customers at Betfred and Paddy Power have enjoyed a variety of BOG offerings for a while. In the UK, they often run ‘happy hour’ promotions. Irish customers have enjoyed BOG on singles all day for over 10 years. We finally get a chance to benefit from it ourselves in the very near future.
