Earlier today, I wrote about how you can status match your way around Atlantic City right now and also (potentially) pick up some free Hyatt elite qualifying nights in Las Vegas / Atlantic City (See: Why it might make sense to roll the dice on status matching). I noted that for those within driving distance, it might be worth a mattress run. For those within the distance of a bus ride of Atlantic City, you might not even need to make it a mattress run.
I haven’t been to Atlantic City in years, but I remember from my younger days that they used to offer a rebate at many casinos for showing up by bus. At the time, I think the bus might have been something like $30 round trip from New York and I had heard that some casinos would give you a $20 slot play card on arrival. I can’t actually recall if I had read ahead of time that they sometimes hand out cash instead, but I remember that on arrival, the casino greeter actually handed out $20 bills to everyone that got off the bus at whichever casino I had settled on. That was probably where the #winning ended, but it made it sting a bit less anyway.
Since I know that there are enough people in the New York-NewJersey-Philadelphia-DC/Northern VA area within a bus ride’s distance of Atlantic City, I figured I’d take a look to see if anything similar still existed. Sure enough it seems as though it does (though I wouldn’t get your hopes up for a $20 bill). Here are some options I found for those of you within a day’s trip of AC:
New York: Greyhound Lucky Streak: $39-$45 RT, comes with a $25 slot play
I can’t find anything on the Greyhound site indicating that these trips come with the slot free play, but I read reviews in a number of places that suggest they still do. I highly recommend reading this Yelp review as it has a lot of the key info. Note that review is nearly a year old, so I’m not sure it’s got all of the most current information, but it seems to match my recollection more or less.
New Jersey / Trenton area: $30 RT, comes with a $30 slot play
Starr Tours offers round trip rides from Ewing, Mercerville, Hamilton, Bordentown, and Southhampton on Fridays and Saturdays. You need to make a same-day round trip to be guaranteed a seat on the home journey, which makes this perfect for those who just want to status match their way around AC without spending the night.
Pennsylvania / Philadelphia Suburbs: $28-32 RT, $30 slot play
Klein Transportation runs round trips on Sundays (and also on Wednesdays during the summer months) from Shillington, Douglassville, Royersford, and Audubon. All of these are more expensive than Greyhound out of Philadelphia, but I can’t find info as to whether or not Greyhound trips out of Philly come with slot play.
Baltimore suburbs: $40 RT, $30 slot play ($25 if you get off at Caesar’s)
Superior Tours runs these buses on Sundays and a handful of holidays from Pikesville, Towson, and Joppa, MD.
Virginia Beach / Hampton Virginia: $65 RT, comes with $30 slot play & $20 meal voucher
This is a day trip that goes every Saturday (arrives back in the Hampton/Virginia Beach area around 8am on Sunday).
Bottom line
I suggest that you do your own research on each of those companies and their schedules / policies as I just briefly glanced at each. Free slot play is usually on a card that you put into the machine. You can’t cash out the starting value, but if you get up over the starting value you can cash out whatever amount above the starting value you have. Don’t look at it as a rebate — look at it as a potential 30min-1hr of entertainment that you get for free with your bus ticket. Still, it’s not a bad deal – especially if your main objective is to get to AC and take care of the status matches to use free nights on a future trip. If you don’t want to spend all day in the casinos, head over to the Knife & Fork Inn for a meal.
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[…] done with good payout. Most other hotel deals require spending some money, such as the recent Atlantic City status matches (you have to physically go to AC) and the beloved Kimpton Inner Circle free night at new […]
Have you ever ridden greyhound? I have. For those of you from countries with good public transit, it is something people in America ride only when there is absolutely no other alternative. That’s not an exaggeration, and i’m not trying to be snobbish, it’s just a fact. A ride on Greyhound is a tour through the social and economic decay in the US. Take all the bad stereotypes you’ve heard about weird people from WalMart. Take all the bad stereotypes you’ve heard about inner cities with its druggies, winos and bums. Put them on the bus. That’s at least half of your fellow passengers. This is one of the dumbest things you could do to get free $20 on slots. And then to start from Trenton, Philly or Baltimore? Oh boy….
I have both taken Greyhound to AC and taken it across the country from Las Vegas to Albany, NY (stopping in the middle) and taken it a handful of other times in my life.
Your assessment isn’t altogether wrong. Greyhound is an experience. On the trip across the country, we got left at a gas station in Ogallala, Nebraska. The driver got off and never got back on. Thirty or forty minutes later, someone went inside and found out it was supposed to be a driver switch — new driver didn’t show up and the old driver just went home. They were sending someone from Omaha, but it’d be 3 or 4 hours. LOL.
Connections are a nightmare — they don’t limit the number of seats sold (if they oversell by enough, they might put another bus on the road…or might not) and (at least back in the day) they let you get off and on wherever you wanted on the way if you bought a full fare ticket. So you never knew whether or not you’d get on the next bus. Saw people miss connections all over the place because of that.
And you’re not wrong about it being a fascinating trip in terms of the social and economic factors in the US or the stereotypes you have about the riders. I remember thinking the worst about a guy who got on with ripped clothes who I thought looked like that druggie/wino/bum you describe. Glad he struck up a conversation with me though — it turned out he had a Master’s degree in sociology and was on his way to visit family a couple of hours away. Terrific conversation with him over the course of a couple of hours. I had him totally wrong and it taught me an important lesson at a young age (think I was 21 at the time) in terms of judging a book by its cover.
Of course, I also had someone ask me for a business card in the Omaha bus station who then proceeded to ask me to move a little so I could block the line of sight to the cop in the corner as he cut a line of coke. I also had about an hour conversation with someone in the middle of the night at the Cleveland bus station before I found out they were homeless and staying in the station (and no, they didn’t ask me for money — just had a good chat).
Greyhound cross-country certainly isn’t the mode of transportation for everyone…and I like a nice 14 hour first class flight as much as anyone…but I’ve also taken the bus plenty of times and lived to tell the tale. I know a lot of readers in NYC (and likely in the other east coast corridor cities) likely don’t have a car — but the idea here was just to alert people to another option. I only used Greyhound as an example out of NYC — where it’s both a short trip and most people are likely not to have a car. The other cities were all bus tour companies.
Greyhound through rural areas has a much better working poor to homeless ratio. The big cities are where you have to be careful– I remember going through Chicago to be especially unpleasant. This is why I pointed out that embarking from Baltimore, Philly or Trenton may not be the best way start to a fun weekend.
I will really appreciate the $20 slot play. Its definitely in consideration.
Until now I had always considered Frequent Miler to provide the most informative research and reports but today the ball was seriously dropped and I’m actually upset I clicked on this link.
A key detail, whether Greyhound ACTUALLY provides free play/cashback on their casino runs was lazily glossed over. Rather than making a call or maybe 2 to Greyhound for an answer or additional insight, instead we get an admittedly outdated Yelp review.
A headline of “Going to AC- Take a Bus” would have served the same purpose but I guess that wouldn’t bring in the click revenue? I hope that future reports return to the quality this blog was known for.
I honestly find it refreshing to read to different topics such as these, compared to the usual take on here’s why you should get credit card ZYX just for 100k points – which is already flooding the blogosphere. Take a chill pill, it’s not the end of the world whether on how much slots credit you get when you take a greyhound to AC.