Inside Asian Gaming

March 2013 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 29 INSIGHTS required there. So a lot of corporations based in Hong Kong are looking to Macau as an option, because what they want to be able to do is provide the same experience to their Hong Kong staff by getting out of the office. And Macau is still considered a home of Hong Kong meetings, for Hong Kong corporates, because their staffs can still travel for the day. It’s an hour away. But it takes them out of their business environment to come here. And on the rotation of the cyclical type of exhibitions and meetings, Macau is considered a relatively neutral destination. If I take Hewlett Packard as an example, they have offices in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai. So if I take the meeting to Shanghai, I The No. 1 thing that hinders Macau is our accessibility. We’re not an international hub. Therefore we work a lot with the airlines, we work a lot with Hong Kong International Airport to enhance that connectivity. We work a lot with the ferry operators to provide a more seamless experience for those transiting through Hong Kong. Brendon Elliott might risk upsetting the other offices. But if I bring it to Macau, there is no favoritism in regard to the location in which they’re hosting the meeting, and therefore there is no cost benefit to any one particular department or business unit. So that provides neutrality. And that’s a good thing we actually leverage off as well. Since the beginning, that was really the vision with The Venetian, to make it a conventions and expo hub. We continue to learn and develop with the Macau Economic Services Bureau and the MGTO as to how we can position Macau as a better conventions and meetings destination. So we’re still maturing. What are the major impediments to developing Macau into a major MICE destination? The No. 1 thing that hinders Macau is our accessibility. We’re not an international hub. Therefore we work a lot with the airlines, we work a lot with Hong Kong International Airport to enhance that connectivity. We work a lot with the ferry operators to provide a more seamless experience for those transiting through Hong Kong. But one of the great benefits that we have is there’s nowhere else in Asia where you’re going to find, in essence, 13,000 rooms, which is pretty much what we have on Cotai, the hotels are all less than 5 years old, with 120,000 square meters of convention and meetings space. Nowhere else in Asia will you find that many rooms within a five-minute walk to a convention center. That becomes a unique proposition, and that’s where Macau’s success—and we’re already seeing our success since we completed the opening of Sheraton—is our ability to draw large, global international pieces of business. We are seeing much more demand and pipeline enquiries for large-scale meetings. From a meeting side we were capacity-constrained. The Venetian was running pretty full. We had some denials and regrets. We couldn’t take everybody who wanted to come in. Some of our policies required that we look more favorably to those staying longer in Macau as we strive to increase the average length of stay of visitors and delegates alike. Now with the opening of Sands Cotai Central we’ve become muchmore accessible as a destination because we can offer different price points across the brand. And the inventory has enabled us to take more groups. How about the people you identify as primarily coming to Macau for leisure. How has their profile changed over the past few years? They’re becoming a little bit more sophisticated and savvy with regards to the integrated resort experience. Over the last three years in particular the shopping proposition as a luxury duty-free destination has phenomenally increased. And what are the reasons for that? We’ve got increased shopping visitation from Hong Kong, because in Hong Kong the shopping experience has become overcrowded with long queues, so Macau is kind of that escape. We see that the Hong Kong market comes to Macau through the day- shopping experience, utilizing dining, spa and shopping. We have a large shopping component, of course, also from mainland China, where a significant amount of the value of our luxury brands is sold. But we focus a lot on shopping as a draw card from India, Korea, Japan, also Taiwan.