The Revival of Retail Sportsbooks

Cuningham's Brett Ewing was recently featured in "Global Gaming Business Magazine" on how the revival of retail sportsbooks has changed how owners approach the design of their gaming spaces. Below, you can read a section of the article. For the full piece, click HERE

"Brett Ewing, principal at Cuningham and executive director of its Play studio, has decades of experience helping operators solve the ever-evolving puzzle of making sportsbooks fashionable. For him, they’ve become much more than just 'rows of seats and screens'—at this point, 'it’s almost turned into theater with the video and the different technical opportunities.' And after all, what is a theater without the proper accouterments? What Ewing and others have found is that sportsbooks work better when they are essentially turned into sports bars that also accept wagers.

'If it’s a well-designed restaurant food and beverage space, I think you can use it for other events, like get-togethers and parties whether it’s somebody’s anniversary or birthday, things like that,' Ewing says. When you really get down to it, some casino-goers really just want a nice space to hang out, and a sportsbook is often a markedly different environment than other areas of a casino floor, often built with a more down-home, wholesome brand of comfort than can be found elsewhere.

'The gathering aspect of it, congregating—I like to use the word congregate—people like to congregate and get together and have fun,' says Ewing. 'So it’s a whole different level now, and food and beverage is a huge piece of it.'"