New casino resort aims to change Macau – the world’s second largest building

A report in The Age says that US billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s biggest gamble makes its debut today when his $US2.4 billion ($A2.9 billion) Venetian Macau, the world’s biggest casino, hotel and resort in the southern Chinese enclave of Macau, opens its doors.

Housed in the world’s second-biggest building — second only to the Boeing plant in Washington State, US, it is claimed — the integrated casino, hotel and resort is pivotal to Macau’s future.

The project aims to create a critical mass that will transform what has been a Chinese gaming city dominated by day trippers into a much broader drawcard, with conventions, trade shows and big-ticket entertainment.

To picture the size of the Venetian, imagine a building large enough to store 90 Boeing 747s, but instead of planes, the building will hold the world’s biggest casino with 850 gaming tables and 4100 poker machines, a 3000-suite (not room) hotel, a 350-store shopping complex and a sports stadium that will hold 15,000 people.

But don’t try to get a room this week — all 3000 suites are booked out for the opening week.

Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation’s first foray into Macau, the Sands Macau waterfront casino, part of the traditional casino area called “The Peninsula”, was the world’s biggest, with 740 tables and more than 1200 poker machines. The Sands recouped its $US260 million investment in eight months and is providing cash flow for Adelson’s far more ambitious Cotai strip dreams.

The Venetian makes even the Sands Macau seem small and, certainly, its scale easily outstrips recent casino openings by US rival Steve Wynn and the Melco/PBL Crown casino.

The Venetian will have 111,000 square metres of convention space — double that of neighbouring Hong Kong — and its own permanent Cirque de Soleil troupe and dedicated theatre.

Roger Federer and Pete Sampras will grace the sports stadium in November and the US National Basketball League will play there in October. Manchester United played a warm-up a few months ago.

The complex comes complete with lagoons and canals and singing gondoliers.  It will eventually have its own ferry terminus to bring visitors from Hong Kong because the existing ferry terminal is already at capacity.  Adelson is also planning his own flights to and from the underutilised international airport, to bring in guests from Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Korea, Indonesia and Singapore.

The Venetian has hired 15,000 people, or 5 per cent of the city’s workforce, to make sure guests want to return.

Adelson has spent the equivalent of Macau’s public works budget for the past five years to realise his vision of making the once insignificant former Portuguese enclave that returned to Chinese rule in 1999 the hub of Asia’s convention, exhibition and gaming industry.

William Weidner, president of Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation, says 44 big conventions have already been booked for the next two years and he expects guests to stay three to four days rather than the 1.2-day average at Macau’s other hotels.

Six months ago, Australian gaming regulator David Green raised a rare voice of scepticism about the prospects for luring non-gamblers to Macau, turning a 40-year history of often seedy casinos with their associated prostitution and crime into a family-friendly convention and resort centre — “Asia’s Las Vegas”.

Green, an Australian adviser to the Macau Government and head of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Macau’s gaming consultancy, said there was no doubt that Chinese day trippers were flocking to Macau’s new casinos, which have mushroomed since the Government ended Stanley Ho’s monopoly three years ago.

But he said that attracting a different kind of punter — middle-class business types and families, shoppers, convention goers and tourists who would stay longer than a night and would spend up big not only in the casinos but to stay at swank hotels, eat and drink at fancy restaurants, take in a show or sports event or just relax by the pool — was much more of a gamble.

He cited Macau’s lack of palm trees, sandy beaches or the kind of other tropical island inducements that traditionally mark major resort and convention magnets.

Today, he says with a laugh, Macau has its swaying palm trees — the Venetian has planted an avenue of them to create the right “tropical” ambience.

Adelson says the Venetian is just the down payment on a $US12 billion investment plan for Macau — 20,000 hotel rooms will be built on land reclaimed from the South China Sea. The casino has an ultimate capacity of 1150 table games and 7000 poker machines.

The Cotai strip — which comprises reclaimed land that now joins the former islands of Coloane and Taipa — has been a vast construction site for 18 months.

Galaxy’s Grand Waldo was the first to open on the strip, in May 2006, but the Venetian, the first mega-resort, is expected to transform the market.

Report by The Mole