Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Caesars taking payments in Las Vegas via popular Chinese app

Caesars Entertainment has started taking payments at multiple locations in Las Vegas from WeChat, a smartphone messaging app that’s hugely popular in China.

Starting on Tuesday, the company began taking WeChat payments at 16 Las Vegas locations, including the Bacchanal Buffet, Beijing Noodle No. 9, 11 retail shops at Caesars Palace, the High Roller and the Eiffel Tower Experience, and the center Strip box office at the LINQ Promenade, which offers show tickets.

According to a year-end report from Tencent, the company that developed WeChat, the number of WeChat users last year topped 768 million, and half spent at least 90 minutes a day using the app.

While WeChat is, at its core, a messaging app, it also gives users the ability to do other things, like make payments, watch videos, get news and order taxis.

In a Wired story last year, Tencent executive Lukens Orthwein said WeChat became a catchall application in China because the country has several app stores as opposed to just two major ones in the West — Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Consumers, he said, felt the app was more trustworthy than the offerings from the multiple app stores.

In September, Caesars began allowing customers to book rooms at its nine Las Vegas resorts via WeChat and plans to do the same at 10 more of its resorts in the U.S. by the end of the year.

Caesars says it will add even more resorts next year and that all outlets at Caesars Palace will accept WeChat payments.