Caesars? Harrahs? Golden Nugget? NJ’s most luxurious casinos

When you think about gambling in the USA, the two main casino destinations that spring to mind are probably Las Vegas and Atlantic City. 

So it might surprise you to learn that there aren’t that many casinos in New Jersey at all - there are less than a dozen of them in fact.

From 1894 to 1939, gambling was prohibited in NJ, but the ban was pretty loosely enforced - slots were still common, and bingo events were held all the time. 

In 1974, there was a vote to legalize gambling in the state, but it didn’t pass until two years later. In 1978, the first casino opened in Atlantic City, and the whole area has been transformed since then.

The gambling industry in New Jersey currently employs about 51,000 people - not bad for a pretty small state.

 The economic impact of the industry as a whole stands at $11.88 billion, and gross gaming revenue in 2023 was $5.78 billion. However, gambling in the state has never quite returned to its peak after a temporary shutdown of all the casinos in the summer of 2006.

Bruce Springsteen said “Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City”, and if it’s good enough for The Boss, it’s good enough for us. Nonetheless, things might have changed a bit since that song was written in 1993, so we at Casinos.com decided to do some research for ourselves. 

We headed to Tripadvisor to check out what people are saying about New Jersey casinos, and tracked mentions of certain keywords like “luxury”, “delightful”, and “indulge”, to decide exactly which casinos in NJ offer the most luxurious experience. 

These are the casinos we looked at: 

We were pretty excited to see what was number one on the list, and turns out that’s Resorts Casino Hotelwhichgot 10.90% on the Luxury Scale. Back in 1978, this was the first casino in America, outside of Nevada, so it has a whole lot of heritage to live up to. 

Six reviews called out “luxury”, five said “pleasure” and a whopping 54 mentioned the word “comfortable”. 

One review in particular said “No wonder it has outlasted many of the casinos along the AC boardwalk. always a pleasure to be there, especially if the slots are hot!”

In second place, we have Ocean Casino Resort, which wasn’t far behind the top place - this one got 10.75% on our Very Scientific scale. 

Ocean Casino had quite a few people call out the word “impressive” in their reviews, for example “The resort is pretty impressive with an elegant personality in every space you encounter” - we think that’s a pretty shining endorsement!

Coming in at number three is Borgata Casino, with 9.67% on the scale. There were over 2,500 reviews of this one, but even so, 21 reviews mentioning the word “luxury” was quite impressive. 

Everyone seems to be very happy with the experience, with one person saying “Dropped my cousin off to this big beautiful hotel that was just simply delightful. She had a wonderful time and the staff was excellent. Great place”.

Right at the bottom is Gateway 26 Casino, with a very sad 0.51% on the Luxury Scale. There was only one mention of any of our keywords, and that was one single soul who said it was “comfortable”. 

When we looked at the reviews in more detail, we realized that it’s more of a family-friendly place to play games, rather than a luxurious casino. 

This one review sums it up pretty well: “This place should only be called an arcade. This is definitely not a casino unless you want to win junk. So very disappointed”.

Not faring much better we have Wild Wild West Casino, with a Luxury Rating of 1.86%. 

12 of the reviews called out one of our keywords, although the majority of those were “comfortable”, which is not exactly huge praise by itself. One review put it quite bluntly: “Very depressing and no signs of authority or security.” Ouch.

Methodology 

Casinos.com utilized Tripadvisor reviews to do an in-depth analysis of phrases associated with luxury to determine the most luxurious casinos in the state of New Jersey. We calculated the percentage of luxury-rated mentions in the total Tripadvisor reviews.

Keywords tracked: luxury, luxurious, magnificent, delightful, comfort, comfortable, impressive, pleasure, indulge, extravagant, fancy, exclusive, satisfied

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