Sands China’s Londoner Grand hotel, formerly Sheraton Grand Macao, has around 1,000 rooms and suites online back online and available during the current Lunar New Year holiday, with the full complement of 2,405 rooms and suites now due for completion by May, the company has revealed.
Further details around progress of Sands’ multi-billion dollar revamp of The Londoner – and specifically the ongoing conversion of Sheraton into Londoner Grand – were unveiled during parent company Las Vegas Sands’ 4Q24 earnings call on Thursday morning (Asia time) which highlighted significant impact on its Macau results as a result of those upgrade works.
Macau subsidiary Sands China still managed net revenues of US$1.76 billion for the quarter, down 5.0% year-on-year, despite having just 315 Londoner Grand rooms and suites online, although Sands confirmed there are just over 1,000 online today.
Once complete in May, Londoner Grand will boast 1,500 suites and 905 standard hotel rooms.
“Upon completion our competitive position will be stronger than ever and we expect meaningful EBITDA growth and margin expansion in the future,” explained LVS President and COO, Patrick Dumont, noting that the company was missing 20% of its hotel room inventory in Q4 as a result of The Londoner works.
“We are in an inventory, room driven reinvestment model, so we base our reinvestment on the scale of our ecosystem, the diversity of amenities, the quality of product, the quality of experiences, and so when you’re down 20% of your inventory there will be a meaningful impact into your productivity.
“We also carry the expense base: our second largest expense is payroll and that doesn’t change, so we simply had less inventory to sell in the quarter. There wasn’t disruption, there was just less inventory, so credit to the team for creating the quarter that they did in this market given the competitive dynamics.
“But I think now that we are starting to get these rooms back across the current quarter, these 2000 rooms, if you think about it that’s the equivalent of two-thirds of a Venetian.
“The good news is [the Londoner’s suites and rooms] are coming online, some of them are online now and the rest of should be coming online by May, and that should position us well to get to our ultimate goal, which is to have two properties that have equivalent run rate.
“Maybe one day The Londoner might even do better than the Venetian because of the key count, but I think the opportunity is there for the productivity to really increase now that the rooms are becoming available and now that we’ve completed this renovation, which in our mind creates one of the best properties in the history of our business.
“We have a high-quality portfolio and getting these rooms back online will enhance our competitive positioning while allowing us to grow cash flow and EBITDA.”
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