London has done it again. A new study ranking the best-reviewed casino in each of Europe’s ten most visited cities has put the capital’s Grosvenor Casino St Giles top of the pile, with a Google Review score of 4.8 out of 5. Sat right in the middle of theatreland, the casino pipped Paris’s Club Circus Paris (4.5) and Vienna’s Casino Baden (4.4) to the title, another small reminder that London still knows how to hold its own against the rest of Europe.
The result holds up under scrutiny, too. The study drew on review data from ten of Europe’s most visited cities between 2019 and 2023, and found that London, Paris and Barcelona each pulled in more than ten million tourists a year outside the pandemic years. With that many people walking through the doors, a 4.8 average is no small thing. Madrid’s Casino Gran Vía I Poker Room came fourth on 4.2, just ahead of Amsterdam’s Holland Casino on 4.1, and Barcelona’s Casino Barcelona tied with Rome’s Slot Palace Le Palme Roma for sixth on 4.0. Athens, Milan and Venice brought up the rear, all scoring 3.9 or below, which says something about how loosely tourist appeal and casino quality actually track together.
While the rankings make for a nice headline, what’s happening underneath them is arguably the more interesting bit. Contactless has already changed how Londoners pay for a taxi or a round of drinks, and that same shift is now playing out at the cashier’s window. More players are ditching cards altogether in favour of e-wallets, and sites tracking the UK’s best PayPal casino sites say the number of players funding accounts this way without handing over card details each visit keeps climbing, according to Bookies.com.
The logic isn’t complicated. Log into PayPal once, link a card or bank account in the background, and from then on you can move money in and out of a casino account without typing anything in again. Withdrawals work the same way in reverse, which matters if you’ve ever waited days for winnings to land back on a debit card. There’s a catch worth knowing about: some UK welcome offers don’t count PayPal deposits toward bonus terms, so it’s worth reading the small print before assuming every sign-up perk applies. Even with that caveat, e-wallets now sit just behind debit cards as the most common way UK players deposit, and PayPal reported more than 439 million active accounts globally by the end of 2025, a scale that has made it a default option almost everywhere regulated payments occur.
None of this is unique to gambling, either. UK shoppers have been drifting toward contactless and mobile payments for years, a habit the pandemic sped up and nothing has really reversed since. UK Finance data shows that contactless debit card payments now account for the majority of everyday transactions, and casinos, whether that’s a slot machine on a high street or an app on your phone, have had to keep up with the expectations set by everything else people buy. If you can tap your phone for a coffee, you expect the same ease when you sit down at a table or log in from the sofa.
Back on the gaming floor, London’s win isn’t much of a surprise if you know the West End at all. Grosvenor Casino St Giles sits inside a proper entertainment district rather than a purpose-built resort, with theatres, restaurants and late-night bars on every side, a world away from the glass-and-marble megaresorts that usually top lists like this. It’s the same patch of London that recently saw the Royal Opera stage a surprise open-air performance of Nessun Dorma on Covent Garden’s Davies Terrace, which gives you a sense of just how much is packed into a few streets once you step off the main road. The casino’s floor covers American roulette, blackjack, three-card poker, Punto Banco and Shoot Dice, but the setting does a fair amount of the work here: a night there feels like one stop on a bigger evening out rather than the whole point of it, which suits London’s after-work and pre-theatre crowd just fine.
There’s something quite London about how the win was earned, too. Rather than needing acres of floor space or rows of slot machines, the city’s top-rated venue got there on consistency, service and setting. That says as much about how London does hospitality as it does about the casino itself. Reviewers leaving five stars tend to mention the staff and the buzz of the surrounding streets almost as often as the games, which is a hard thing for a resort casino stuck out by a motorway to compete with.
The bigger picture is that London is managing to hold onto the old and adapt to the new at the same time. It’s got the bricks-and-mortar reputation to top a Europe-wide table, and a player base increasingly happy to run its casino spending through the same wallet it uses for the rest of its life. Whether PayPal keeps that lead or another e-wallet takes over further down the line, the direction is pretty clear by now: fewer cards changing hands, more taps on a phone, and a capital that’s still, on most measures, the one to beat.
