There’s a very interesting story about Macau from the Independent:
The Grand Waldo is a large casino with 168 tables and 334 slot machines, but it also has restaurants, shops, a luxury hotel, spa, nightclubs, a fitness centre, a swimming pool, a children’s playground and, inevitably for a casino targeted at the Chinese, karaoke facilities.
There is no question where the punters come from. The discerning ear can pick out the distinctive dialects of Fujian, Beijing and Shanghai – this is a playground for mainland Chinese gamblers.
It feels as if a casino is being built on every bit of land in Macau, making one fear for the elegant ruins of churches built by 16th-century Portuguese missionaries. Where no land is available, it is taken from the sea. The Grand Waldo is merely the first to open on the Cotai strip, a £13bn neon avenue of casinos, hotels and shops on 200 acres of reclaimed land that connects Taipa and Coloane, two small islands off the southern Chinese peninsula.
Elsewhere on the strip, beneath scores of cranes, armies of hard-hatted workers are putting the finishing touches on the Venetian Macau, a 39-storey replica of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, with a huge statue of the archangel Gabriel on top and 3,000 suites inside.
The strip will raise Macau’s current tally of 12,000 hotel rooms to 54,000 in 10 years. The backers of the scheme, the single biggest tourist investment anywhere, are betting it will steal the gaming jackpot from Vegas.
Macau generated £3bn in casino-gambling revenues, just slightly behind the Las Vegas strip’s turnover of £3.2bn. But where Las Vegas beats Macau hands-down is on non-gaming income. In Vegas, visitors stay a lot longer, spend a lot more but gamble a lot less.
Many of the 19 million visitors lured to Macau’s balmy precincts are day-trippers, or gamble their way through their visit, or stay in a massage parlour. Nearly three quarters of all money spent in Macau goes on gambling, leaving just £12 per visitor for other activities. In Las Vegas, gaming makes up just 41 per cent of the spend, with the rest, an average of £128, going on hotels, food, shopping and entertainment. Cotai’s promoters hope the strip will solve the conundrum of how to make people stay longer. By injecting Vegas-style glitz, they aim to overcome the reputation for seediness and gang warfare that Macau has developed.
It’s a good snapshot of where Macau is now, though I find it interesting that Stanley Ho is included almost as an afterthought.