Enjoy S.A. has asked the Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego to relinquish its permit for Casino Gran Los Ángeles – nearly 12 years ahead of its scheduled 2038 expiration – a move that, if approved by the Super’s Consejo Resolutivo, would leave the operator with just one casino nationally: Enjoy San Antonio, itself down 61 per cent in visits since 2019.
From 10 casinos across four countries to one
Enjoy, founded by the Martínez family in 1975 and now controlled by the company’s former creditors, once operated 10 casinos across Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia at its peak. Two rounds of judicial reorganisation – the first triggered by pandemic-era closures, the second in January 2024 – split the portfolio apart: international creditors took the Punta del Este, Coquimbo, Pucón and Castro properties, while national creditors, now operating as Casinos de Chile, took over Coquimbo, Viña del Mar and Pucón, all three of which they’ve since relinquished back to the state in 2025. A planned handover of the Rinconada casino to that same group remains on hold pending the Tribunal de Defensa de la Libre Competencia’s ongoing collusion investigation into Enjoy, Dreams and Marina del Sol.
Why Los Ángeles, specifically
Los Ángeles and San Antonio are Enjoy’s smallest operations by some distance. Down 18.6 per cent year-on-year; Los Ángeles alone saw visits fall from roughly 44,000 in the January-April 2019 period to around 22,000 in the same window this year – a 47.9 per cent drop, compounded by a particularly difficult local landscape of illegal physical casinos operating nearby.
Given those numbers, the resignation is being framed as a responsible call rather than a distress signal – a reading that industry observers have questioned somewhat, given Los Ángeles’s committed economic offer (roughly 22,000 UF) isn’t especially burdensome compared with larger concessions like Viña del Mar’s. Whether San Antonio eventually follows the same path remains undecided, though if it does, Enjoy would be left with no casinos at all, raising real questions about the company’s continuity, and about what happens to the roughly $36.8m fine the Fiscalía Nacional Económica is pursuing over the 2024 collusion case, along with the still-pending Rinconada, San Antonio and Los Ángeles permits tied to that same proceeding – a factor that could yet give the Consejo Resolutivo reason to block this specific resignation, as happened with Rinconada.
Where Enjoy’s remaining energy is going
Enjoy’s future lies substantially in online betting rather than rebuilding its physical footprint. The company has consistently pushed for online regulation that puts licensed digital and physical operators on a competitive footing, and views the current situation as unsustainable long-term.
Enjoy isn’t alone in positioning for that shift: rival Marina del Sol has already registered the “Marinabet” trademark with Chile’s Inapi, positioning itself to launch online once the pending betting bill clears Congress. In the meantime, under general manager Andrea Wolleter, Enjoy has been executing what the company calls an operational efficiency plan: workforce cuts down to roughly 300 employees (from a peak of over 5,000 across 10 casinos), renegotiated supplier contracts, and cost reductions that brought sales costs down 19.2 per cent and administrative expenses down 20 per cent in the latest results.
Whether the company will bid on new concessions going forward remains an open question even internally – sources describe Enjoy’s approach as evaluating each tender on its own merits rather than committing to either an expansion or a full retreat, while stressing that participating “is always on the table.”