LAS VEGAS — Getting into the casino business? Then you better offer something fun and interesting beyond gambling, or the next slot parlor that opens down the road will eat your lunch, warned casino developer Steve Wynn, during a speech given Tuesday during his industry’s most important trade show.
“It was never the slot machines,” said Wynn, explaining his success in the gambling business. “The machine has no power unto itself.
“From Bangor, Maine, to Phoenix, [patrons] are an hour and half to a slot machine.” Every casino in between, he said, is vulnerable to the next “box of slots” that comes along.
“You’ve got to give people something they’re willing to get on an airplane and submit to a body search for,” Wynn said. “That ain’t a slot machine.”
The 72-year-old casino builder delivered the remarks in a keynote address at the Global Gaming Expo, the casino industry’s most prominent annual trade show.
It was Wynn’s first public address since his plans for a $1.6 billion hotel casino on the Mystic River waterfront in Everett earned the Greater Boston resort casino license two weeks ago.
Wynn hopes to open his Everett resort in 2017, presuming that the state casino law survives a repeal measure on the November ballot.
Wynn said Las Vegas has survived casino expansion throughout the United States by offering unmatched dining, shopping, and unusual entertainment, in addition to the slots and table games.
He is already planning ways to wow patrons at “the moment of arrival” at his Everett resort. He imagines an atrium 60 feet wide, he told the crowd, with a tall room behind it, a glass elevator and two curved escalators that diverge.
Wynn delivered his speech to a packed ballroom of hundreds of casino executives, vendors, lobbyists, and regulators.
The casino Expo, known as G2E, runs this week at The Sands Convention Center at The Venetian, a luxury Venice-themed casino hotel replete with canals and gondolas on the Las Vegas Strip.
Wynn’s flagship property is right next door, the bronze Wynn-Encore resort, an enormous casino, hotel, and golf complex where the billionaire developer lives with his wife, Andrea, and several masterpieces from his modern art collection.
During a brief question-and- answer session, he said he is unimpressed with the prospects of Internet gambling and will take a pass on it.
Mark Arsenault can be reached at marsenault@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bostonglobemark