Thomas R. Reeg
Chief Executive Officer at Caesars Entertainment
Thanks, Brad. Thanks, everybody, for joining. I'll fill-in some detail on fourth quarter, talk about full-year '25. And since we're almost two months into first-quarter, I'll give you some color on what we've been seeing during this quarter as well. As Anthony spoke to fourth quarter in Vegas, we were proud of our performance versus last year's inaugural F1. You can see we were roughly flat. Our volume indicators also flat.
So room revenue, cash room revenue for us was down less than 1% for the quarter despite the lack of the F1 business. F&B revenue is similarly down a little less than 1% and our volume indicators in gaming were up slot win, obviously, slot coin-in was an all-time record for us in Las Vegas. Table win was up year-over-year, helped slightly by a little bit better hold.
If you look at regional -- recall that regional was -- has $500 million or so of trailing EBITDA out of our $1.9 billion that's in the middle of facing new competitive threats in those markets with about $200 million of properties that have tailwinds behind them. We -- in the fourth quarter, you can see that even with just about 10 weeks of New Orleans and two weeks of Virginia, our year-over-year return performance in regional is down about 5%.
As we talked about on the last quarterly call, we talked about the headwinds versus the tailwinds. What I'd tell you is since that call-in October, we've been pleasantly surprised that the competitive impacts that we were anticipating have not been as severe as we anticipated and the performance of our newly opened properties has been stronger-than-expected.
So that I'd expect regional instead of being a down slightly to flat year in EBITDA should be flat on the left-side of the range and up slightly on the right. So pleased with that.
Eric talked about the digital, the momentum, we're up 64% in iCasino in the quarter, and that's on-top of a full-quarter of Caesar's Palace online last year, where I think we were up 50 something percent. So we're stacking quarters on-top of each other now. Feel very good about that. Everybody knows about the sports outcomes that are out that were unfavorable in the fourth quarter. We can see our structural hold efforts continuing to bear fruit. We're off to a good start in the first-quarter. I'll get into a little more detail as we go.
In terms of '25, I spoke to you about regional I expect flat to slightly up in EBITDA across that vertical. In terms of first-quarter, we're kind of right on-top of last year. Recall that we lose a day with the LEAP year last year between now and the end-of-the quarter. Frankly, that could be the difference between we're flat or we're down a couple of million bucks, but it's -- our regional business continues to improve. We are now attacking properties that have opened.
Our typical operating philosophy is for the first-quarter or two, we don't try to spend into trial. But once our customers have had the trial period. We're in fighting and we're increasing investment in battleground markets and I'd encourage you to look at properties let our earnings state monthly revenue reports out of Iowa, out of Indianapolis that show what's happening with share and revenue as we fight for those markets following competitive openings.
If you think about regionals going-forward, Virginia has been beyond our wildest expectations in terms of performance. Typically when you double capacity gaming capacity, your revenues don't keep up with that pace. There's some dilution because you're adding so much product. Virginia has kept pace. We've effectively doubled revenue after doubling capacity. Margins are obviously not quite as strong as they are in the tent where they were over 60%, but we're well into the mid-40s in terms of EBITDA margin. So that's driving strong results. New Orleans had a spectacular Super Bowl. It had a very good fourth quarter.
January was difficult. Recall that the terrorist event in New Orleans four blocks from our site. It was December 31st. We had a citywide convention that canceled shortly after that and then you had the first snow -- measurable snow in the city of New Orleans since 1,895. So we've had about 3.5 months now of performance, almost four months in New Orleans, but it's been a roller-coaster given what's happened. We're super-proud of the property that we've built. We've been able to show it to our best customers during the Taylor Swift show shortly after opening. And then the Super Bowl, it's been very well-received. The numbers are very strong, excluding the noise around the terror and weather.
So we feel very good about where those two properties in particular are heading into '25 and through the first couple of months. In Vegas, if you think about '25 -- I'm sorry, to finish on regional, by the end of '25, the sole remaining competitive opening of any substance that we'll have not faced is the second PEN Chicago area move from their current site to the new land-based site. The bulk of what impacted us in '24 will be well over 12 months behind us and there's very little coming behind that. So as I've said, we're more sanguine on '25 and regional '26 should be even better as competitive trends abate and New Orleans and Virginia continue to grow following those investments.
In Las Vegas, we obviously we had the Super Bowl last year and our peers have commented on headwinds relative to not having Super Bowl this year. If you recall, last year, we were outside on the negative side our normal range of holds. So we held very poorly at the tables. In this quarter, we're back into our normal range, although not heroic, we're still at the left-side of that range for the first two months, but the recovery back to normal hold should just about offset the loss of the Super Bowl room revenue. So depending on how March comes in, we should be about flat in the first-quarter, which I think is different from what you're hearing elsewhere in-town. And group business will increase this year over last year.
Group increases significantly again in '26 with and the State Farm conference that's specific to Caesar's early in '26. Recall that State Farm group is big enough. It comes every three years. It's big enough that the final event three years ago or two years ago now was the -- what was a sold-out Garth Brooks conference at Allegiant Stadium. So that's an awfully big group that's Caesar specific. So '25 and '26 set-up very well for us in Las Vegas. In digital, digital has had an exceedingly strong first-quarter for us. If you look at iGaming for us, January was up 64% in net revenue. Keeping in mind that first-quarter last year was up 54%.
February is tracking to the same number, but again, we'll have one less day. So I'd expect February to-end up somewhere in the 50s in terms of growth rate. Cash-flow continues to increase. I'd expect you're going to start seeing the best quarters that we've ever posted to date shortly. And all of our targets remain the same. Recall that we laid out our targets before we even launched Caesar Sports that we could reach $500 million of EBITDA, we're well on that path. The remaining piece at the end of '25 will be the roll-off of some big partnership contracts in the beginning of '26. And then I'd expect that we'd be at our targets. And recall those targets have not moved since those were just numbers on a spreadsheet almost four years ago at this point.
So the combination of that, Anthony talked about how our capital expense has come down significantly. We should have in the neighborhood of between among interest expense, lease expense, total capital expenditures and cash taxes in '25, our outflows will be around $3 billion. So you can take whatever your EBITDA estimate and subtract that and that's our free-cash flow number. We did start to buy-back stock in '24. You should expect that our main majority with free-cash flow remains paying down debt. We want to continue to reduce leverage as we have since we closed the transaction in July of 2020, but now we have share buybacks as well.
And with that, I'll throw it back to the operator for Q&A.
