Boomtown Casino New Orleans to Move Inland, Rebrand as Hollywood Casino
Penn Entertainment will invest $195 million to relocate its Boomtown Casino and Hotel New Orleans from its riverboat to a new land-based facility on adjacent property in Harvey, Louisiana.
The rebranded property will now be known as Hollywood Casino New Orleans. The project requires approval from the Louisiana Gaming Control Board, and if it receives approval, Hollywood Casino New Orleans is expected to open in 2029 with 875 slot machines, 45 table games, a retail sportsbook, and multiple dining options across roughly 140,000 square feet of new development.
The announcement follows Boyd Gaming’s earlier-this-month disclosure of plans to move its Amelia Belle riverboat inland. Two Louisiana riverboats are going ashore within weeks of each other. That’s less a coincidence and more an indication of what’s to come in the Bayou State.
A 30 Year Legal Tussle With An Interesting Finish
Boomtown opened on the water in 1994. Hundreds of other casinos across Louisiana, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Mississippi opened in the 1990s. They were built on boats or on structures designed to resemble boats because state laws required gambling to occur on waterways. The premise was that casino gambling, an activity many state legislatures viewed with deep ambivalence, was somehow more acceptable if it happened on a vessel as opposed to on land.
The practical result was predictable. Casinos built moats around parking lots and called them navigable waterways. They constructed barges that never moved and surrounded them with enough water to technically qualify as riverboats. At first, the workaround in Louisiana was a bit more difficult, as the law required boats to actually cruise. That requirement was eventually dropped. By the time most of these markets reached maturity, the nautical fiction had been entirely stripped away, leaving permanent, stationary gaming structures sitting on or next to bodies of water for no reason other than legacy regulation.
Louisiana lawmakers acknowledged the obvious in 2018, passing legislation allowing riverboat casino license holders to move gaming inland, provided the new facility stays within 1,200 feet of the original berth, which is approximately a quarter mile. It’s a law that feels a bit arbitrary, but it did allow all the casino boats to go ashore, but only barely.
A Strong Revenue Case for Moving Inland
Boomtown’s gross gaming revenue for Louisiana’s fiscal year ending June 30, 2026, was about $104.6 million, down from pre-pandemic levels that regularly reached $130 million to $140 million annually. The property draws between 60,000 and 70,000 visitors per month. It is by no means a failing casino. But the revenue numbers suggest it is stagnant, competing against the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where land-based casinos with full resort amenities have pulled Louisiana customers for years.
The data from other inland moves is compelling. Treasure Chest Casino posted substantially higher revenue in the fiscal year after its inland move and continued to grow the following year. Penn’s own Hollywood Casino Aurora, which moved inland from the Fox River in June 2026, is already producing what CEO Jay Snowden described as record quarterly retail segment revenues with strong VIP visitation trends.
Moving inland lets operators build dining, entertainment, and hotel amenities that draw destination visitors, not just gamblers. A riverboat has a limited footprint. A 140,000-square-foot land-based development does not, while maximizing revenue sources.
Penn’s Fourth Inland Move Marks a Systematic Shift
The New Orleans project is Penn’s fourth landside relocation in recent years, following Hollywood Casino Aurora and Hollywood Casino Joliet in Illinois and the upcoming Hollywood Casino Council Bluffs in Iowa, expected to open in 2028. Penn is executing a systematic program of replacing its aging riverboat portfolio with land-based facilities under the Hollywood Casino brand.
The pattern across the regional casino industry is the same. The riverboat requirement was a legislative compromise that made casinos politically viable in the 1990s by wrapping them in a fiction that gaming regulators, casino operators, and eventually lawmakers all agreed to pretend was meaningful. Decades later, the operators are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to move thirty feet off the water, and the states are letting them do it because the alternative is watching those customers drive somewhere else.
Hollywood Casino New Orleans will open in 2029. The riverboat it replaces will be vacated, and the casino it hosted for 35 years will have moved on.
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