Manila’s gaming push seen to boost tourism

Manila’s tourism market is taking a decided turn away from a vanilla offering to boost visitor numbers. This Southeast Asian casino dreamscape is setting up a battle between established gaming giants and independent operators in a high stakes contest.

Malaysia’s Resorts World integrated resort at Newport City was the first to break the ice with a mix of in-house hotel brands and one international managed property under Marriott.

Accommodation demand in the domestic and overseas corporate sector outpaced gaming-generated room nights.

According to hospitality consulting firm C9 Hotelworks, the current conundrum facing the sector is that a massive pipeline of incoming mega-hotel projects at Pagcor Entertainment City and Resorts World are likely to cannibalize the existing industry’s leading market source, which is domestically generated business.

A prime example of the trend has been demonstrated at the much-touted Solaire project, which has seen a strong shift away from gaming guests and is now tracking market share growth with MICE (meetings, incentives, conference and exhibitions) and corporate visitors becoming the dominant end users. This has resulted in downward pressure on room rates on the broader set of Manila Bay area hotels, the company said in its Manila Hotel Update.

C9’s managing director Bill Barnett said that “hotel gaming properties which have established connections to foreign visitors such as Resorts World in Malaysia and Singapore and the City of Dreams from Macau work in strong fundamentals.”

“They have a database of existing regional clients who have credit lines which can be extended to the new Philippine properties. Freestanding operations such as Solaire and the upcoming Okada project are likely to be challenged to draw overseas guests to their properties.”

In C9’s market analysis, perhaps the largest challenge for Manila to become competitive with the likes of Singapore and Macau is mainland China. Last year over 80 million Chinese travelers headed overseas and, by 2018 the number is estimated to rise to 400 million.