Worth the Effort
Did the foreign casinos overspend on their casino facilities?
To accept the proposition that Macau’s Chinese VIP players and their middlemen are fundamentally promiscuous in granting their favours to casinos—the gambling equivalent of strumpets or gigolos who will bed hop as soon as someone makes a better offer—is to raise a rather worrying proposition for investors in the Macau gaming industry. This is that the operators could have saved themselves the time, the trouble and more importantly the cost of recreating high roller rooms in the style of the French king Louis XIV’s Versailles palace, and put up cheap and cheerful traditional Macau VIP rooms instead.
“The first Paiza [VIP] club at Sands [Macao] sat empty for the first twelve months, until the casino finally came to terms with the junkets,” states the insider.
“Those beautifully decorated suites are now busy, but the funny thing is they now look more like traditional SJM VIP rooms. They have all the paraphernalia and detritus that seem to accompany the junket staff in any casino in Macau.”
In other words, the Western operators’ VIP offer has effectively been ‘Chinesified’.
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