Things are obviously getting serious for land-based bingo halls here in the UK. With the upcoming smoking ban supposedly about to drive loyal customers away and competition from online bingo halls starting to bite into revenues, Birmingham MP John Hemming has come out with a motion to cancel the VAT tax on bingo halls and offer them some relief.

Personally, I think this is merely delaying the inevitable as the world’s land-based and online bingo players shift with the times to more technologically advanced bingo platforms. People will not stop playing bingo, they will just play it a different way.

Already we are seeing the introduction of land-based bingo halls adopting fully-electronic bingo game platforms that are virtually the same in look and feel to today’s free online bingo offerings. Riva Gaming Group has opened England’s first fully electronic bingo club in Sutton, London, with the club featuring 582 new personal handheld bingo terminals – this is as about as close to playing online bingo games as you can get without going online.

I actually hope Hemming’s motion is passed and he succeeds in removing the VAT tax from bingo, but I don’t think it will preserve land-based bingo as we know it today.

Written by John Witherspoon - Play bingo online at http://bingostreet.com/ and read online bingo news.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 3:47 am and is filed under Online Bingo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.