If you can’t bring a casino to Miami, bring Miami to a casino.
That’s the strategy Genting has adopted with a gambling cruise ship capable of ferrying 1,500 passengers a day from the south Florida city to the company’s new Resorts World Bimini in the Bahamas.
The service is scheduled to coincide with next week’s opening of Resorts World Bimini, and Genting has committed US$11 million to pay for improvements to a Miami terminal to handle it, according to news reports. Genting also will pay the Port of Miami yearly rent of $7 million.
The Bimini SuperFast, as as the boat is called, offers two trips a day, one leaving at 9 a.m. for the two-hour voyage, returning at 7 in the evening, and a second “Night Party Cruise” departing at 9 p.m. and returning at 5 a.m. Tickets start at US$49. Passports are not required for US citizens.
The ship has a restaurant, bars and lounges and a two-story nightclub. There will also be gambling on board once it departs US and Florida territorial waters. Blackjack, roulette, craps, machine games and sports betting will be offered, in contrast with Florida, where only Indian tribes can operate blackjack, and racetracks are limited to slots and poker.
Conversely, Resorts World Bimini’s casino is much smaller than Florida’s casinos and racinos. It’s listed at 10,000 square feet and contains 15 table games and 153 slot machines. The Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., is about 14 times larger.
Still, the cruises represent a long-awaited first step into the Florida market for the Malaysian resort conglomerate, which also owns about half of Norwegian Cruise Lines. Genting purchased the old Miami Herald headquarters in 2011 with plans to develop a $3.8 billion megaresort designed to attract gamblers from around the world. But opposition was intense—from the Indian tribes and the pari-mutuel sector and from the theme park industry—and the company failed to get a bill through the state Legislature to change the gambling laws to allow the casino.
Genting says it still plans to build a luxury residential and hotel complex on the site to be called Resorts World Miami.
