A review of Mecca's online offering
10 Jun 2010
There are not that many bingo halls in the United Kingdom that can boast the history and the reputation enjoyed by Mecca. In fact, the Mecca company was the first advancement of commercial bingo into the country, brought by charismatic entrepreneur Eric Morley (he also founded the Miss World pageant) back in the 1960s. The high streets of the United Kingdom can attribute the presence of their bingo halls to Morley as well, as he continued to campaign and develop the game into one of the nation's most popular past times.
Today Mecca's bingo empire includes 120 different clubs across the country, with over three million members. The company has also been partnered with Rank Group, a globally renowned company. The sheer clout of Mecca, with a reputation as a frontrunner as far as UK bingo development is concerned, might lead you to believe that the company has enjoyed an online presence for quite a while, but in fact Mecca is fairly new to the online bingo hall scene. It did not open the doors to its virtual hall until 2005, and in this review we take a look to see if it is worth the cyber pilgrimage.
The welcoming page that leads you into the game play area is all that we could ask for in an online bingo hall. It is indeed welcoming, making use of bright colors and a well laid out format which makes it easy to negotiate one's way around. There is a nicely tabbed out menu that will take you right to the bingo options you wish to play.
Because it's bingo we are interested in, we went straight into Meccagames.com, and were pleased to see a variety of games on display. However, it was a little annoying to run into some ambiguous navigational issues at this point. On the left we found two different links, one to "bingo world" and the other to "Mecca bingo". The second link does not in fact take you to any bingo games but rather to information about the company's land based clubs, an addition that we thought was a bit superfluous, not to mention potentially confusing.
Once you do get to the sign up page, you will find that the registration process is quite easy. Unlike other sites, Mecca has a menu of free trial games, although we were disappointed to see that the flagship of the site, 90 ball bingo, was not among the options. On the other hand Mecca, unlike so many other online United Kingdom bingo halls, has developed their own non download software, so the experience is unique to the site. The software is not quite as smooth as some of Mecca's major rivals, but it is certainly adequate, and the site is busy most of the time and that means good prizes as well as plenty of social opportunities.
A major disappointment to us was that Mecca does not support any of the browsers used by Macs. While this is unfortunately all too common among online bingo halls, Mecca claims in its published content to support Mac platforms. The excellent customer service informed us that in fact Mecca was under development and trying to incorporate Mac friendly software, but it was not up and running yet.
Finally, we found that as far as promotions go Mecca is a little bit thin on the ground. The only welcome bonus was a match after a new player has committed ten pounds, although this is certainly better than some sites.
All in all, Mecca is a site worth playing, so long as you don't want to find a big bingo bonus or are one of the majority Windows users out there.