The industry name for the technology is TITO, short for “ticket-in, ticket-out.” When you cash out of a video poker or slot machine, it produces a printed voucher of your winnings, which you can then take to a cashier—or leave atop the machine for the next player, if you feel like passing on some good karma.

TITO has been in widespread use for years, long enough for a generation of gamblers to not know what it’s like to walk around a casino floor with a bucket of quarters. It’s been around for so long, in fact, that some older gamers might not remember that they used to hate it.

“When TITO was introduced 15 to 20 years ago, it was just an absolute failure,” says professional gambler and Las Vegas Advisor publisher Anthony Curtis. “I mean, nobody wanted to touch it. Nobody wanted tickets coming out of slot machines and video poker machines. They shelved the whole thing, and it took a couple more years for it to surface and pick up a little bit of steam. Now, you can hardly find a place that does not use TITO.”

Las Vegas adapted to TITO, as it has adapted to numerous other sea changes in gaming, entertainment and hospitality. Mobile apps have eliminated the need for guests to wait in line for show tickets and hotel check-in. The advent of online sports betting and online poker didn’t clear out Vegas’ casino floors; it strengthened their appeal. And people didn’t stop playing slots when their cash payouts were replaced by an audio sample of cascading coins and a “cashout voucher.”

But Vegas’ most recent upgrade might take a bit of time and effort to roll out. Several Valley properties, including Resorts World on the Strip and Aliante in North Las Vegas, have introduced cashless gaming to their casino floors, both on their machine and table games. To put it simply, cashless gaming replaces nearly all the elements of casino play that call for physical currency; no more ATMs, no more feeding bills into a slot machine, and perhaps surprisingly, no more TITO.

“You’ll be able to take your phone into a property, connect it to a slot machine and transfer funds from an account, basically using your phone as an in-between,” says Blake Rampmaier, senior vice president and chief information officer for Boyd Gaming. “When you’re finished playing the machine, any funds you have left over move back into your digital wallet.”

It sounds simple enough on paper, and it’s likely second nature to anyone who came of age in the smartphone era. If you’ve recently used Venmo to pay for your share of a work lunch, you’ll probably get the hang of the Boyd Pay digital wallet inside Boyd’s B Connected app or Resorts World’s Play+ inside of two minutes. Older players, however, might be intimidated by the learning curve (the Play+ app comes with a 5-minute tutorial video) or mistrustful of the technology.

“This is something for the kids who are already indoctrinated into this sort of commerce,” Curtis says. “But the current people, the Boomers and Gen Xers, who [are gaming now] are going to be a much tougher sell.”

And then there’s the matter of what cashless casinos mean to a city whose identity was built on the concept of cash. Even machines that no longer dispense coins have images of coins and bills on them.

These are the headwinds cashless gaming faces. But this innovation has something going for it that TITO didn’t—TITO itself. People are already accustomed to taking their winnings as something other than a bucket of metal. A cashless Vegas is a when, not an if.

Cashless gaming didn’t emerge fully formed yesterday.

“Really, what we’re talking about is electronically funding my slot machine using digital currency,” says Richard Hutchins, Resorts World’s senior vice president of casino operations. “I could also do that with a keypad entry in a slot machine, and in its infancy stage, that’s what some of the operators had started to try years ago. I’d go to the cage, make a deposit of cash to my cashless account and then insert my player’s card into a slot machine and enter my PIN number.”

The Nevada Gaming Control Board began addressing cashless wagering in its regulations in 2003, according to NGCB Senior Economic Analyst Michael Lawton. He points to a more recent, 2017 NGCB regulation that defines a “wagering account” as “an electronic ledger operated and maintained by a licensee for a patron in connection with the patron’s use and play of any or all authorized games and gaming devices,” along with some 3,700 more words on how such an account should be created and used.

The tech has been ready for a while, too. Apple famously introduced the first mass-market smartphone in 2007. PayPal, one of the methods you can use to fund your Play+ account, debuted its first mobile apps in 2006. And QR (Quick Response) barcodes, a key component of cashless wagering apps, have been around since 1994. All the parts needed to make cashless gaming apps have been lying in wait for several years, ready to fall into place together.

What has changed in recent years—very recent years—is that we’ve acquired an aversion to touching things other people have touched.

“COVID sped up a lot of technology and innovation,” Rampmaier says. “Contactless products is one of the things that we’ve been working on that really helps to improve the customer experience—to make it more seamless, to reduce friction. Because, let’s face it, it’s not about the wallet. The customer really doesn’t necessarily care about the wallet. They care about the fact that they don’t have to carry cash [and] they can move their money around for multiple things within the Boyd gaming ecosystem. It makes their experience more enjoyable.”

Boyd and Resorts World parent company Genting aren’t alone in adapting their business to COVID-era sensibilities. Disney’s theme parks division recently killed off its paper-based “FastPass” service in favor of a mobile app, continuing a move to mobile that began with its ticketing. But Disney might be moving into the cashless space too quickly; it has also gone all-in on mobile restaurant reservations and mobile food and beverage ordering, and its social media accounts are filled with guest complaints about spending half a day at Disneyland consulting phones for one thing or another.

Vegas doesn’t intend to go that route.

“We still have players cards,” Hutchins says. “You don’t want to prohibit anything when a guest walks in; you don’t want to restrict them.”

Boyd’s approach is the same, Rampmaier says. Cashless wagering is only a component of the player’s club, not a replacement for it.

“You need to be a B Connected member in order to use Boyd Pay,” Rampmaier explains. “When you’re accessing your funds with Boyd Pay, it’s the same thing you use to access any of the other items that we offer through the B Connected program.”

In other words, Vegas isn’t about to make it harder for anyone to play.

“We want to introduce the latest technology, build a framework for the future and to continue to develop that value proposition, and make some guests want to adopt it,” Hutchins says. “But if they want a physical player’s card, or they want to walk up with cash, they can still continue to do that.”

“I absolutely do envision a time when just about everything is cashless, somewhere between a decade and 15 years from now,” Curtis says.

And it’ll happen just about everywhere. Resorts World, the first Strip resort to launch with a cashless gaming component, will likely see the functionality spread to its neighbors within the next few years. Boyd intends to roll out cashless across all of its resorts once it has proven itself at Aliante, and gaming tech company IGT also has a carded/mobile cashless service, Resort Wallet, in trials.

And then there’s everything else for which Vegas is known: dining, entertainment, nightlife, accommodations. Hutchins envisions a time when entire visits to Resort World will be directed from your phone.

“[When a guest] takes off at the airport, they’re using their phone as a ticket, right? When they land, they’re going to want to get an Uber, so they’re going to use their phone to do that. They walk into the resort and check in with their phone, and their phone is their digital key. … I go to the restaurants and bars, and I use my phone for the payment. I go out to the casino and use my phone for cashless wagering.

“There’s a lot of things that happened in that process, with different technology companies and technology partners, [but] it’s absolutely where we’re going. And it’s not one of those long-term future things. It’s within eyesight.”

Rampmaier concurs. “By year’s end, we should be good with Boyd Pay at most, if not all, of our food and beverage outlets,” he says. “Next year we’ll be focusing on hotel and other non-gaming amenities—spas, entertainment and so on.”

Cashless transactions might even benefit employees, Curtis says. Rather than deterring guests from tipping, he suggests it could help there, too.

“I think people who tip are going to tip. I grew up in this culture, and I know that when I do things I tip, and if it’s easier for me to tip it’s just great. … In a way, that makes it a little bit easier when you put [the suggested gratuity] right in front of them and give them a prompt.”

That’s the good news. The bad news, Curtis suggests, is that some current casino jobs could change radically, or be eliminated outright, if cashless gaming becomes ubiquitous.

“The whole idea behind cashless, robots, everything else, is to make things more efficient and more profitable, which unfortunately often means the loss of jobs,” Curtis says. “You can get clues about this stuff by looking back in history. … Every casino used to have people walking around, making change. You don’t see that anymore.”

Even so, it’s difficult to imagine what comes next. Boyd is quietly introducing cashless elements at its other properties, and Resorts World’s app feels like it could easily accommodate more cashless elements without changing its sleek, handsome UI.

And Las Vegas, founded on concepts that are as analog as they come, will always feel like itself, even if its casino floors are staffed by robots and its stages peopled by holograms. When TITO took away cash payouts, the sound of the coins remained. Some parts of this experience are too indelible to be removed. They can only be upgraded.

“Change is usually good,” Curtis says. “This one’s going to be a bigger hump to get over, because it’s so widespread; it affects so many different things. It’s not just the way your coins come out of the machine. It’s the way you do everything—the way you order a cup of coffee in the morning, the way you pay for your room, the way you get chips to play on a table … you know, if we’re even using chips at that point.

“This change is so immersive and all-encompassing that it’s gonna take longer,” Curtis continues. “But overall, these technological things that come along progress things favorably. And that’s probably what’s going to happen here.”

Protect your tech

Your phone is like a wallet. It contains information that can be used to steal your identity, expose your personal life and drain your bank accounts. If you’re going to use it in casinos—or anywhere outside your home, really—here are several steps you should take to safeguard your phone in the event that it’s lost or stolen.

Enable a lock screen.

This is your phone’s first line of defense, and if you don’t have one enabled, stop reading this and turn it on right now. The best versions are the least convenient—complex passwords and long PIN codes that are tiresome to enter several times a day. Biometric lock screens—fingerprint scanners, iris scanners, facial recognition—also offer strong protection. Don’t bother with pattern locks; thieves only need look at the shape of the smudges on your screen.

Turn on your locator.

Hey, you left it sitting on the bar; it happens. Make sure you’ve turned on your “find my device” functionality now, before you need it.

Set up remote lock/wipe.

Nearly all recent Android and iPhone models offer a way to use your home computer to lock your phone remotely, or even wipe it clean of personal data. Take the time to set it up, and familiarize yourself with how it works.

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