Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming April 2016 14 Industry profile IAG: Glenn, you’re unmistakably Irish with that accent and two businesses in Macau with the word “Irish” in them! When did you come to Macau from Ireland and why? Glenn McCartney: I came to Macau a couple of years before the handover to do a project for the Portuguese administration for a small events company. At the time the New Century in Taipa was advertising for a PR director and I applied. It had 600 bedrooms making it the second largest hotel in those days after the Lisboa. They gave me the job, and soon after a casino opened in the property and I was appointed director of sales and marketing. It was a good experience for learning about the gaming industry; about issues like junkets and so forth. It was also a time of negative publicity for Macau because of the triad wars. Visitors were primarily people from Hong Kong who just wanted to gamble. Percentage-wise, visitors from China were in single digits. It was a completely different era from today. IAG: You’ve got a lot of hats, what with owning the Irish Bar near the Jockey Club and the Irish Coffee House near Park n Shop in Taipa, as well as being an academic at the University of Macau and also doing some more direct work in the gaming industry over the years. Which one do you consider your “main gig” so to speak and why? GM: There’s a common theme to all of my work and that is hospitality. It was an opportunity I spotted after I came to Macau, partly because at the time very few people were looking at hospitality in gaming as a science. Compared to all the literature on Las Vegas and Atlantic City, there was little or none on Macau. So I developed myself through education and understanding of the science behind gaming development in a jurisdiction. Since 2002-3 this has pretty much been my gig. I did a PhD on the mainland Chinese market by correspondence with the University of Glenn McCartney is Assistant Professor in Hospitality and Gaming Managment at the University of Macau. But to expats in the city he is better known as the UK’s Honorary Consul and owner of Taipa’s Irish Bar and Irish Coffee House. For last month’s St Patrick’s Day he organized a ball at the Grand Lapa Hotel with the Macau Irish Chamber of Commerce, and an expat football match played out in damp cold to remind everybody of home. Steven Ribet finds out what motivates a man with so many different hats.