Shun Tak Holdings has an interesting take on environmentally friendly business practices if a scene witnessed by Asian Gaming Intelligence recently is anything to go by.
Shun Tak, chaired by Dr Stanley Ho and run on a day-to-day basis by his daughter Pansy as managing director, recently introduced a Premier service to its TurboJet ferry operation. It sails four times daily in each direction on the Hong Kong to Macau route.
The Premier service is a sort of Orient Express of the seas. In return for paying a premium on the normal TurboJet fares (namely HKD212 for a Premier Class seat; HKD312 for a Premier Super Class chair or a whopping HKD1,548 for a four-seat Premier VIP Cabin) travellers are treated to plush furnishings in mustard yellow, more leg room and—cheesecake (a perennial favourite of Shun Tak catering for some reason).
One of the AGI team was recently running to catch a bog standard afternoon ferry to Macau, when he noticed at a nearby gate an earlier ferry about to depart. Seeing there was no standby line for the earlier boat and so feeling a little smug at spotting an opportunity others appeared to have missed, our colleague flourished his ticket to the amiable clerk assigning seat numbers. Imagine his disappointment when the member of staff informed him that particular departure was for “Premier passengers only”.
This was despite the fact that there was a whole sheet of little yellow stickers (indicating empty seats) on the clerk’s passenger manifest. This fact was confirmed when our man looked through the windows of the terminal at the interior of the ferry cabin and saw the maritime equivalent of tumbleweed blowing up and down the near-empty aisles of the vessel.
When our man politely pointed out it might be better to let him fill up an empty seat on the earlier departure and therefore free his booked seat for another standby passenger—thus in theory helping to maximise TurboJet’s ferry loading and creating an improved stream of revenue for Shun Tak—the customer service official shrugged his shoulders. Our colleague even offered to forgo his complimentary slice of cheesecake, but to no avail.
“I understand what you are saying, but it is the Premier service,” he replied, with a look that suggested a similar point may already have been put to him by other disgruntled passengers.
So there you have it. It seems Shun Tak would rather let a half empty boat sail across the Pearl River Delta burning up precious fossil fuels and leaving a carbon ‘boatprint’ in its wake, than have a few Premier customers discover they’ve been joined by bargain basement day trippers.
Is that inefficient management, or is the premium paid by ‘Premier’ customers sufficiently large that Shun Tak can merrily burn up the Earth’s resources and still make a good profit?
And was that what the organisers of G2E Asia had in mind when they announced they would be giving Dr Ho a ‘Visionary Award’ at this year’s event in June?
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