From the terrace of my apartment on the 25th floor of One Grantai the whole of the Cotai Strip glitters below, from the subtle ochre shades of the Venetian Macao reflected in a huge lake, to the beckoning laser lights of Macau Studio City scorching across the night sky 1.3-km further down the Strip.

The fireworks display heralding the anniversary of the day Macau returned to mainland Chinese sovereignty 15 years ago have just ended and were an added bonus to mark my return to Macau. A decade and a half ago the Cotai Strip – now the most famous mile of gaming and entertainment in the world – was little more than a wasteland; much of it under water for part of the day as the tide surged up and down the narrow muddy channel separating Macau from mainland China.

Seven years ago, all that changed with the opening of the multi-million dollar Venetian Hotel and Exhibition centre owned by Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation (LVS). In the following three years, Adelson added 11 more hotels offering over 20,000 room choices, acres of gaming tables and non-stop entertainment from around the world, transforming the low lying foreshore into a gleaming new city.

Actually, the apartment is not mine: It belongs to an acquaintance, who back in January 2008, plonked down a sizeable deposit on a 5,000 square foot flat, then nothing more than an artist’s rendering in an oversized burgundy colored brochure, along with a promise to pay a further US$4 million upon completion.

The result certainly included a million dollar view but my friend went unusually quiet when asked what it is worth today. I had the distinct feeling he was one of the many who believed the real estate boom that started a decade earlier would simply never end. Looking down on the glitter of Cotai, one can see literally thousands of luxury flats and serviced apartments that have been built, firstly to give Cotai a critical population mass and secondly, to help pay back the six main players who had invested billions of dollars to create this “Las Vegas in the East”.

I was among the 100,000 visitors to the Venetian Macao on the day it opened – 28 August 2007. Although much of it had still to be completed when I left Macau soon thereafter. My starting point for this evening was to be Cirque du Soleil’s 1,800-seat theatre within the Venetian, to see for myself whether the innovative “Circus of the Sun” was still able to entertain and captivate as it had done for so many years at its permanent sites in Las Vegas and elsewhere. I was not disappointed and left the Venetian with a reminder to thank my host for recommending I book in advance.

What they didn’t see
The “Cotai Strip” may have been the brainchild of Sheldon Adelson but had he been more familiar with the vagaries of Macau’s extreme weather, combined with a level of pollution that invariably left the small city state in a permanent haze, he might have suffered an occasional nightmare. Even on this December night, when a visitor might rightfully expect the best weather of the year, it is hot, muggy and hazy.

A telephone call to Las Vegas earlier had told me the day there was clear with 40 degrees of heat and low humidity but as usual, in the desert Southwest, it was windy. In fact, from memory, I can think of very few comparisons to be drawn between Las Vegas, Nevada and “Asia’s Las Vegas”, as Adelson billed it at the time.

LVS owns or manages some 12 hotels on the Strip which offer more than 12,500 rooms and this doesn’t include several thousand more serviced apartments and condominiums. The company operates casinos and gaming business in 14 different locations.

Adelson solved the weather problems by linking his properties with elevated, air-conditioned walkways but, naturally, neglected to include those of his competitors, unless LVS managed them. This being so, I had to hoof it across the six-lane highway to reach the City of Dreams (COD), the first non-LVS project to be completed on the Strip proper. Again, I had left Macau as the James Packer-Lawrence Ho complex was beginning to rise out of the ground. Despite having been scaled back from an imaginative underwater casino concept, COD lives up to its name and located, as it is, at the very head of Cotai, the glass covered round and oval shaped towers rising above the casino floor reflect the lights of Cotai in an amazing manner.

Crossing the road, I passed one of the busy Cacao light rail stations as a four-car train whirred out of the elevated platform 30 feet above my head. The railway, which links the border with Gongbei and the airport and ferry terminals near Pac On has only been up and running for a little over a year, well over its scheduled completion date of 2011.

The US$525 million project was redesigned and rerouted many times in the planning stages but in the end it still mainly serves to link the casinos and arrange the flow of mainland visitors from the border gate to gaming outlets and then on to the entry/exit points for ferries and the airport. To me, the carriages running on rubber tyres looked full and it was certainly the easiest way to move from one end of Cotai to the other.

I was told very few local people used it other than to go to work and back if they happened to live in areas such as Areia Preta en route to the border. Hotel owners on the Strip have followed the example of the Venetian and provide 24-hour bus service between the border and casinos of choice. This being a free service, often including a ‘goodie bag’ and discount vouchers, it was a ‘no-brainer’ which form of transportation to take to Cotai. Despite all efforts, there are still too few taxis available and those that are operating can only be found on the choice routes from ferry terminals to casinos and hotels, refusing point blank to take passengers through the city’s crowded back streets.

Glenn McCartney, an assistant professor of tourism in Macau, had once foreshadowed such infrastructure problems as being high on the list. “Already the bus services are at a standstill. The shuttles run by the casinos have become a de facto public bus service. Local people use them to get to and from work”. That was seven years ago with the situation even more pronounced now.

The more things change, the more they stay the same
As I moved further down Cotai, through the lobbies and casinos of new hotels, all carrying familiar names, Hilton and Conrad, Fairmont and Raffles, Shangri-La and Traders, Four Seasons, St Regis, Holiday Inn, I began to get a feeling of deja vu, for despite attempts to make each site different, there was nagging ‘sameness’ that pervaded them all.

The Venetian, although the oldest hotel on Cotai – seven years already for goodness sake – set the benchmark for shopping arcades with its huge vaulted ceilings, acres of carpeting and ornate stonework and passageways that seem full of promises, everything you would expect in Venice, but without the smell of the canals.

It was a hard act to follow and not everyone has managed it. To my mind, eventually, there had to be a limit on the number of successful designers with Italian and French names who can claim to support a fashion line. How on earth, I thought, can all these hundreds and hundreds of shops stay in business? Furthermore, most of the high-end restaurants were already closing up for the night and it was still only 11pm. The food courts though were jam packed and noisy, as late night, one-day visitors from mainland China grabbed a bite to eat before catching their buses back to Gongbei where they would spend the night in more affordable and familiar surroundings.

A shift change in Cotai at 12 midnight saw an estimated 60,000 people on the move, half of them going home and the other half about to start an arduous overnight shift. Glenn had some years ago presented a paper on branding, suggesting that “Macau needs to look again at its branding: The message that is going overseas. It is important to give tourists a very clear idea of what they can expect. Is it to be heritage or ‘City of Events’, or is it to be gambling and entertainment. Too many messages will confuse visitors”. His words were prescient.

Casinos are pretty much standard places, no matter where they are located. A gaming table is limited by size alone to the number of people betting at any one time. On the house side there is a ‘pit boss’ watching that both the croupier and players keep their hands above the table and sometimes an assistant to help move bets around. Cameras monitor all tables. In Macau the game of choice is still baccarat; no one knows why, but over 80 percent of gaming tables are designed for this one game.

As a result, the SAR has become the hottest market in the industry. 10 years ago, revenues from gaming climbed about 50 percent in a single year to reach more than US$5 billion while visitor numbers were up 40 percent to reach 16.7 million; more than half of whom came from the mainland. By 2009 revenues had hit US$14 billion and last year (2013), a total of around US$22 billion was divided up amongst casino operators and the Macau government. Purportedly, 35 million visitors will visit this year.

Whereas the average visitor to Las Vegas stays about three days, the average visit to Macau is slightly over a single day, yet Macau visitors lose roughly twice as much as their American counterparts in just one-third of the time. Cotai was been built on the premise that this trend will continue and all the new high-end hotels will encourage gamblers to stay longer and lose more. Glenn had spoken about ‘problem gambling’, suggesting in 2007 that it needed to be addressed and given greater priority than was then the case”. Granted, this situation is now of the highest accord but some would say it’s a matter of too little, too late.

Cotai bubble
I was reminded of a conversation earlier in the day with Professor Jose Duarte, an economist at the University of Macau, who forecasted seven years earlier that Cotai could become a separate city, self sufficient and completely independent of ‘old Macau’. “It would begin” he said, “when Cotai reached a critical mass and offered enough attractions that there would be no need to go elsewhere”.

Yes, the strip in Macau proper would continue to prosper but because of land constraints it simply would not grow any bigger. In 2007, he predicted the majority of the 120,000 employees in Cotai would have to fall back on old Macau as an affordable place to live as they were squeezed by ever rising rents in Taipa. Naturally, they could not afford to live on the Strip. Many even lived in neighboring Zhuhai and commuted daily. “It works differently with visitors”, said Jose. The Cotai model involves meeting a tourist’s every need, their transportation, accommodation, food and shopping, so there is no need for them to go anywhere else in Macau. That is a trend that is certain to grow”, he said.

The administration of the first Chief Executive Edmund Ho, which oversaw all aspects of Macau’s development for 10 years, is judged harshly in retrospect. People I talked with on this visit viewed the first decade of local administration as an opportunity missed. There was a time when Macau could have become a gem they said. Instead it was a period racked by corruption, inept town planning and a government trying to come to grips with young and inexperienced staff, and worst of all: Greed!

Glenn believes there was a need for services to keep abreast of the growth in gaming and tourism: “In 2007 there were only 54 hospital beds on Taipa and none in Coloane. I have heard of no plans to increase that number even though millions of people will visit Cotai each year”, he said. The first government’s lack of experience was reflected in its policies regarding imported labour. If you are going to quadruple the number of hotel rooms and treble the size of the gaming industry while keeping other businesses and industries on track, and if you have seen unemployment drop to a negligible three percent, it would seem logical that you would need to find more workers.

The trouble was, however, that imported labor from mainland China, the Philippines and other Asian countries, was cheaper than could be found in Macau. Local people wanted more money and were used to doing a lot less for it. The Government’s answer was to introduce a rule that croupiers in casinos must be Macau residents and for good measure, bus drivers as well. Meanwhile hoteliers’ cries for help went unanswered.

My final call of the evening was to be Macao Studio City, a sprawling complex near the Lotus Bridge to Henquin Island. Hopefuls were still lining up trying to get a seat to watch the taping of a late night quiz show being recorded in one of the smaller studios. I walked past the studio complex heading straight towards the Playboy Mansion. I approached the club in Macau with the distinct feeling it would be as dated a concept as Disney is today, the sort of place dancers and singers go to retire.

Hugh Hefner’s daughter, Christie, however has pulled out all the stops to ensure the Macau Playboy Mansion will be instrumental in turning the Playboy Group back into real profits. The mansion, modeled on Heffner’s original club in the US has its own casino, complete with bunny clad croupiers. The dZ(cor has definitely been updated but what attracted me most was the scale of the club. Although it covered 40,000 square feet, it had been cleverly designed to give the impression you are a guest in a room in a real mansion. Less than a mile away, in the Venetian, I had been standing a few hours earlier in the biggest gaming hall in the world, an interesting experience but not something I would do frequently, maybe every seven years.

by Laetitia von Bock

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