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Gala Bingo bonus drop?

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Is Gala Bingo dropping their £10 bingo bonus due to financial troubles?

Visiting Gala Bingo website lately, I surprisingly found that no free bingo bonus is offered at the moment. In fact, I couldn’t even find the deposit bonus of £10 they used to offer. Are the recent financial troubles at Gala that bad?
Dropping their bingo bonuses is not the first sign of cuts at Gala… We’ve heard a lot of news lately about Gala Bingo closing down their land based bingo halls, the latest in Leven which is in Scotland, and we’ve also heard of Gala’s plans to sell the recently closed club in Upper Norwood, London to be used by the KICC Evangelical Church, which is upsetting quite a few of the residents in the area.
In addition, the hall recent closures have led to 300 jobs being cut as a result. These recent steps were said to be taken in order to deal with Gala Bingo’s huge debt of 2.7 billion pounds (!), and meant to free up an amount of 550 million pounds to invest in the company and avoid closing down. If their debt was not problem enough, the recent “bingo tax” planned in the UK is yet another blow for the bingo giant – the tax on profits from bingo is to be increased from 15% to 22%, scraping another 7% from their future income. All this only a year after we’ve seen them splashing big money on expensive TV ads featuring celebrity Sharon Osbourne (see bellow).
I’m not sure if this new bingo tax is to affect online bingo sites as well, but even if not – for companies who operate land based bingo halls as well this will surely be a negative effect, and Gala’s drop of the free bingo bonus might very well be the sign of that, and it’ll be interesting to see how the tax increase affects other bonuses given and the near future – you can check out the Bingo Slots blog for more updated info on online bingo.

Gala Bingo’s TV ad featuring Sharon Osbourne:

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