For a long time, the casino was a destination, not a pocket-sized habit. One set out to arrive in a specific place, often steeped in reputation: Monte Carlo for its nineteenth-century prestige, Venice for its history, Las Vegas for its scale, Macau for its almost dizzying concentration of gambling and tourism. The journey was as important as the table. There was the hotel, the suit, the dinner, the entrance to the room, the physical burden of the wait. The casino, in short, was not just a service. It was a geography.
Today, part of that geography has been compressed onto the screen. And so Spinando Casino Italia makes sense within the contemporary vocabulary of travel, because it conveys a simple and very modern fact: that gambling can follow tourists to the airport, on the train, in a hotel lobby, or into a ship's cabin.
When the game built destinations
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The connection between tourism and casinos didn't begin with the internet. It began much earlier, when gambling was used as a driver of regional development. Monaco is a textbook case. The Société des Bains de Mer was founded in 1863 and transformed a then-underdeveloped area into a hub of hospitality, gaming, and social life that would give Monte Carlo its name. A system of attractions was built: hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and an urban identity. Gambling, in this sense, is a driver of tourism even more than a pastime.
Las Vegas takes this logic to an industrial scale. Recent figures from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority show 41.676.300 visitors in 2024, nearly 6 million conventioneers, an estimated economic impact from tourism of $87,7 billion, and an average gaming spend per trip of $820.
The smartphone has changed travel time
The turning point comes when gambling ceases to depend on location. With mobile, the casino enters the interstices of travel: the gate before boarding, the evening in the room, the taxi transfer, the empty afternoon in a city where it's raining and the museum is closed. The downtime of tourism, which once was filled with a magazine, a drink, or a destinationless stroll, can now be filled with a gaming session.
European data helps measure this shift. In the EGBA's 2025 annual report, which provides a snapshot of its members' 2024 outlook, online casinos account for 51 percent of gross online gaming revenue, ahead of sports betting at 41 percent. The same document shows €13,5 billion in total gross revenue and €202,1 billion in winnings returned to players. These numbers describe a mature industry, with licenses in 21 European countries and a now structural presence in people's daily lives, including travel.
Why then do real casinos still matter?
If gambling is now available everywhere, why do certain destinations still retain such a strong presence? The answer is quite concrete: physical casinos offer things that digital casinos cannot fully replicate. Architecture, ritual, social exposure, quality of service, proximity to other consumer goods. A live table weighs more than on-screen graphics, even when the game offered is similar. Tourists entering the Venice Casino or the Casino de Monte Carlo also buy into the context, not just the stake.
Macau demonstrates this particularly clearly. In 2024, it recorded 34.928.650 tourist arrivals, a 23,8 percent increase over the previous year. In a city like this, gaming is one of the pillars around which visitor flows revolve.
Live online as a contemporary compromise
Between the resort and the smartphone, a middle ground has emerged: the live casino. It's perhaps the product that best captures the present, because it brings the croupier, the table, the scanning of the hand or wheel to the screen, yet leaves the player within the private space of travel. It's not a traditional casino, nor is it a slot machine played alone on an automatic beat. It works precisely because it offers a modicum of theatricality without requiring physical movement. For frequent travelers, it's the format closest to the idea of a truly "suitcase" casino.
In the end, the relationship between tourism and gaming hasn't dissolved. It's split. On one side, there remain the major destinations, with their numbers, their hotels, their settings, and their symbolic value. On the other, there's a game that follows the traveler, adapting to their pace, slipping into pauses along the way and into the hotel's idle hours.
