João Manuel Costa Antunes, director of the Macau Government Tourist Office (MGTO), managed something of a minor miracle by speaking for more than an hour about the territory’s visitor market last week without once mentioning the ‘c’ word—i.e., casinos.
Actually, he did mention casinos once, but only to highlight the fact he hadn’t talked about them earlier.
“The casinos do a very good job of marketing themselves. They don’t need MGTO’s help,” observed Mr Antunes at the launch of his organisation’s annual report. He did not allude to the fact that marketing of gambling inside China is not allowed.
It’s possible to argue that with Beijing still imposing travel restrictions on its citizens wishing to visit the casino city, it’s politically more expedient to push the idea of Macau as a World Heritage centre as befitting its UNESCO status.
The number of visitors to Macau from Thailand and Singapore did admittedly rise 81 percent and 41 percent respectively in 2008, though when one looks more closely at the figures one sees it’s from a very low baseline. In 2007, there were 140,749 visitors from Thailand—only 0.52 percent of the total 26.9 million visitors that year. There were 189,657 people coming from Singapore—0.7 percent of Macau’s total 2007 arrivals.
Mr Antunes was also enthusiastic about the possibility that in 2009 Macau could attract more travellers from Vietnam and Indonesia, which he described as “large, very interesting markets”.
No amount of talking up the prospects of luring visitors from the likes of Vietnam and Indonesia in the coming 12 months can though obscure the fact that Macau is overwhelmingly a China-focused playground and overwhelmingly a hard gambling market.
The idea that visitors from Hanoi in Vietnam will be willing to spend nearly two hours on a plane (assuming they can get a direct flight to Macau, rather having to travel via Hong Kong) to go and look at 16th and 17th century Portuguese catholic churches is a little hard to swallow. In case anyone had forgotten, Vietnam has some western colonial architecture of its own. St Joseph’s cathedral in Hanoi looks from the outside like a scaled down version of Notre Dame in Paris. And the first Catholic missionaries visited Vietnam from Portugal at the beginning of the 16th century, long before the French put in an appearance as the regional colonial overlords.
Even assuming Vietnamese and Indonesian travellers have the cash and the inclination to come to Macau for the casinos, VIP and mass market gamblers from such secondary Asian economies are likely to be hit just as hard if not harder by the economic slow down than VIP and mainstream players from China.
Vietnam may seem at first glance a promising market for Macau given that Vietnamese citizens are not allowed to gamble in that country’s few official casinos. In reality many high net worth Vietnamese (the target market) often have access to a foreign passport. They also have access to casinos much closer to home along Vietnam’s border with Cambodia. For those Vietnamese wanting something a little less rustic and more VIP-focused, there’s NagaWorld in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh and the planned Angkor Park Resort near the Angkor Wat temple site outside Siem Reap. In addition there’s the prospect of integrated gaming resorts opening in Singapore from the end of this year and early next.
Macau has also suffered from the flighty attitude of some regional airlines in its attempts to build markets outside Greater China. A number of carriers have started direct flights from Southeast Asia to Macau only to cancel them at short notice because of fuel price rises or other commercial worries. As a result travel agents and target customers have had little chance to familiarise themselves with the Macau ‘product’ or to market it consistently and effectively. The Macau government could of course choose to offer subsidies to these airlines to help diversify the territory’s visitor profile, but so far appears to prefer to let market forces run their course.
Mr Antunes—perfectly reasonably, for a man in his position–appealed to the assembled media at the press briefing not to talk Macau into a recession. There’s a difference though between positive thinking and blind faith. AGI is sure that’s one lesson that the modern Catholic Church in Macau and Vietnam has already taken to heart and one that the MGTO might also wish to contemplate.
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