Visiting Sky Bingo
When you first visit the Sky Bingo homepage, you’ll notice how there’s links to a lot of other Sky entertainment options, such as their Sky Vegas and Sky Poker outlets. Despite including these other segments of the main Sky brand, SkyBingo manages to keep the layout of the site simple and streamlined. This is an element of its design that a lot of other Sky Bingo reviews praise also, as it’s quite an impressive feat to offer so much diverse and yet keep everything in neat sections. But our Sky Bingo review intends to look beyond the purple and white colour palette, and to how simple it is to locate the Sky Bingo login page, as well as whether the games are within easy reach.
Taking inspiration from other bingo sites perhaps, Sky Bingo online has chosen to decorate its homepage with a large overview of its bingo titles, with users than given the option to visit the full bingo lobby. If you opt to visit it without being a member, you’ll be prompted to register via a new pop-up window. The first step of your registration will be to add your name, with you then proceeding to fill in more personal details on the next few pages; the process isn’t as compact as say Mecca Bingo’s, but it’s still relatively quick to complete.
From the homepage, you can choose to explore the promotional materials of the brand (something we’ll discuss in a moment), and/or you can visit the Sky Arcade. The latter subsection is filled with slot machines, similar to how other bingo brands function, but rather than having everything in one place, SkyBingo has separated the different genres of its iGaming activities.
Sky Bingo Bonuses
As with virtually all online bingo labels, SkyBingo welcomes its new users to the family with a bonus. This Sky Bingo bonus follows similar rules to many other bingo promos, with newbies able to get a bonus of up to £60 when they deposit and spend £10. Even though this isn’t a Sky Bingo no deposit bonus, a reward that many of you would have undoubtedly welcomed, the mechanics of this offer prove to be generous.
To qualify for this offer, besides being a new, never before depositing player, you also need to use that £10 allocation of cash on buying bingo tickets; if you spend that money on anything else, you’ll void the offer and miss out. Once you’ve done this, the £60 bonus monies will be credited to your account in two ways: a £40 bonus intended to be spent inside any of the bingo rooms only, and a £20 Rainbow Riches slot reward. If you’re only visiting SkyBingo for the bingo games, you may feel like this bonus isn’t completely fair, however we think it’s more than fair, as it acknowledges that you may wish to explore other avenues of the Sky brand as well.
After getting your bonus funds, you’ll have 30 days to use both of them. What is more, both types of bonuses will come with two separate sets of wagering requirements; as you’d expect, the £40 bingo bonus carries a much smaller x2 rollover, while the slots bonus is a much higher x20. Even though it’s a higher rollover to meet, it’s lower than the online casino standard we’ve seen elsewhere.
In regards to the other types of bonuses SkyBingo delivers, you’ll find that there’s a well crafted blend of regular, weekly and daily promos, as well as seasonal offers that change throughout the year. Although this is good to see, we were a little surprised to not see any mention of a VIP club or loyalty scheme. Perhaps this is something that is available but simply that the information isn’t readily available, or maybe Sky Bingo has instead opted to focus their attentions elsewhere; either way, the lack of loyalty schemes seems odd given the popularity of the brand.
Sky Bingo Promo Code
In-keeping with the promotional aspects of the site, we come to the topic of Sky Bingo codes. Unlike a lot of brands who either have all their promos demanding codes or to do away with them altogether, SkyBingo alternates between the two. It could be argued that this can make accessing promotions a little confusing, but as long as you read the terms and conditions, you shouldn’t experience any problems.
So what is a Sky Bingo promo code? It’s when you can only trigger a bonus by using a special phrase/code, e.g. for one of their recent Easter deals, users have to input the code “EASTERWINS”. If this part of the offer is missed out, you’ll not be able to reap its benefits. If you have a Sky Bingo bonus code but aren’t sure which offer it’s for, there’s a clever little option you can select that says to “Log in to claim”. From there you can add the Sky Bingo promotion code without needing to worry about which deal it’s for, of course, that could also mean you end up getting a deal you might not want. Aside from that however, SkyBingo bonuses need little more explanation.
Jackpots and Promotions
This section of our SkyBingo review may seem redundant, but is actually hugely important for those of you who want to learn every tidbit of information about promotional materials, including jackpots. Jackpots are often seen as separate to promos, but in fact the two are quite closely related. A case in point is on the Sky Bingo promotional page, which lists several games that offer huge jackpots, provided you play on a specific day/at a set time. An example of this that we’d like to share is the Showtime! bonus; available every Friday at 7pm, inside three of SkyBingo’s bingo rooms, users can win a share of £2,500.
The games that take part in this jackpot promo has a feature known as multi-ticket prices, meaning sometimes you’ll only need to buy a 1p ticket but there’s also tickets that’ll cost 10p. Be aware that the price of tickets has a direct impact on the amount of the cash prize you can win. Furthermore, players can only purchase up to 30 tickets per game, which is a surprisingly generous amount given the sum of money SkyBingo is looking to giveaway. Speaking of the games themselves, they will play every six minutes, therefore making this a very fast paced jackpot deal to play for.
There are other jackpots to be won, but due to the high volume of them, and the fact that some deals will finish in the coming weeks, we feel it’s best for you to research the others for yourselves. If you should want to do this, please note that many of the terms are similar to what we’ve just mentioned, and so accessing these deals should be super easy.
Sky Bingo Mobile
Now that we know the types of promos we can take out, it’s high time we learnt whether we can play SkyBingo on a variety of devices, or whether we’re chained to our desktops. We doubt it’ll surprise anyone to learn that there’s a Sky Bingo app you can download, both for IOS and Android devices. The app may be available for other mobile devices also, but we struggled to find solid information with reference to this. Nonetheless, if there isn’t an app for every system of smartphone, you can always rely on the SkyBingo mobile website, playable via your mobile web browser.
Looking specifically at the app for the moment, you’ll be pleased to learn that the app is completely free to install. Out of over 850 reviews, on the Android store alone, users have given SkyBingo a 4.6 star rating out of 5; this is on par with a lot of the other big bingo labels out there, and so you can be confident in the Sky Bingo application and its abilities. Please bear in mind that the bingo app will only give access to bingo related features, if you want other Sky entertainment, you’ll need to download those apps separately.
Sky Bingo Games and Software
Assuming that you’re ready to play some Sky Bingo UK titles, you need to decide whether you want to explore the bingo lobby only or whether the Arcade is also an experience you wish to try out. As already mentioned earlier, both of these subsections can be reached from the homepage.
If we look at the bingo titles first, the first three you’ll see are Sky exclusives. What this means is that these games are unavailable anywhere else; exclusives are a fantastic way to keep fans coming back for more, and so the more options the better. Should you prefer well known, popular titles instead, SkyBingo has several other bingo games, such as Rainbow Riches Bingo, and Deal or No Deal. A lot of the activities are 90 ball bingo, but there’s also some 75 options as well.
When you look at each of the bingo games thumbnails, you’ll note that there’s a countdown associated with each title; this is so you know when the next game is about to begin. Alongside this information, you’ll also see the cost of the tickets, the current cash prize up for grabs, and the amount of people playing at the moment. These details change regularly and as a result are updated accordingly. The steepest price per ticket we came across was £1, with many of the others between 50p or less.
As for Sky Arcade, we won’t go into too much detail, as it’s (mostly) separate to Sky Bingo, however we will say that slot machine fans should visit. There’s a lot of on trend Sky Bingo slots there, coming from developers such as Playtech; SkyBingo recently switched over their site software to Virtue Fusion, aka Playtech, which explains the selection available.
Deposits and Withdrawals
In regards to banking, something which will go hand-in-hand with the gaming services of the label, we find that SkyBingo lacks diversity in reference to payment methods. At one time of the day they allowed PayPal transactions alongside their Visa and Mastercard ones, but not everything seems to be credit/debit card based or via Apple Pay. Although disappointing for ewallet users, the plus side of this is that all payment options can be used for both deposits and withdrawals. What is more, you can have up to three payments associated with your account at a time.
When you need to make a transaction, both deposits and withdrawals can be made from as little as £10; this isn’t as low as some bingo labels, but it’s still within the industry standard. Moreover, you won’t be charged any nasty banking fees for gambling with SkyBingo, although your bank provider may attach their own. Specifically looking at deposits now, we find that the process is an instant one, like with many other iGaming sites, however withdrawals take much longer; the normal timeframe is five business days. If you’re waiting on a withdrawal, it’s important to remember that weekends aren’t included within that timeframe.
Another element of Sky Bingo banking we need to draw your attention to is currency. Sky is an international brand, however its bingo site appears to only allow banking in GBP currency; if you’re in doubt or have questions about this, we’d advise contacting the team for further details. However, we would like to add that single currencies, particularly GBP, is pretty normal for the online bingo community.
The Community
As we draw closer to the end of our review, we’d like to talk about community, e.g. social media. Sky Bingo actually has a dedicated page within its promos section, therefore making it much easier for social gamers to connect to the brand and one another. Far too many bingo brands either leave us guessing, or offer a very poor social media offering that does little in adding depth to the brand. Fortunately, Sky Bingo is incredibly active on both their Twitter and Facebook pages.
Best of all, by following them on these channels, you open up another promotion to yourselves, in which you can enjoy Winners Wednesday. This is a weekly deal that all social media players can join in with. Up until 11:59pm that evening, 10 lots of £25 cash giveaways are available, with you only needing to use a related hashtag and providing your username for you to qualify. We can’t stress how unique this is, and how it goes to demonstrate how dedicated SkyBingo is to its players.
Pros and Cons
Overall, our time with Sky Bingo has been immensely enjoyable, with us already looking forward to returning for some more quick, easy, big money bingo action. And yes, we know that’s a mouthful! But all joking aside, this label really does reward its users and in such a way that makes it hard for its competitors to keep up. Nevertheless, there’s always aspects of a website that could be improved, which is why we’ve got this handy little review section; here we’ll give you a quick rundown of the good and the bad, so that you have all the necessary details.
Pros
- Simple navigation and layout
- Mobile app and mobile optimised gameplay
- Good, frequent promotions
- Active social media channels and giveaways
Cons
- Only currency available is GBP
- Ewallet banking has been removed, making options more limited
- Some bingo games cost more than normal
- Not as wide a variety of bingo games as other bingo websites
