Inside Asian Gaming

April 2016 inside asian gaming 15 Industry profile Surrey in England. I was one of the first to research the behavior of outbound Chinese from different mainland cities and what drives them to spend. IAG: Being well into your second decade in Macau, you’ve seen a lot of changes here. Which have stood out the most to you? GM: There’s obviously changes in the physical landscape. When the Portuguese were here Taipa was fairly undeveloped and there was more green. There was nothing between Taipa and Coloane; just a road that I used to run along looking left and right at the sea. The airport was just about finished. There’s also been changes in the population and in society. Before you didn’t see many foreign faces in Macau or hear much Mandarin. Of course the pace was slower and people had more time for each other. Now there’s a lot more money in the system; it’s more about luxury brands and materialism. I AG: You’re often quoted in the media in relation to Macau’s tourism industry. Is Macau just about gaming, or do you feel there is a genuine tourism industry here quite separate to the casinos? GM: Even back in the early 2000s we were looking at what had to be done for Macau to move forward. Macau has if anything reinforced its gaming identity since then and that has shown through in its revenues. Gaming is very much the footprint of Macau. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the issue is how you then build around that gaming to attract other leisure and business segments. IAG: Both the Macau and mainland governments are pushing diversification of the Macau economy. Is this a realistic goal in the short and medium term? What about the long term? GM: I’m not optimistic we can move forward until we remove the obstacles to diversification. One of them is branding, which is paramount for how you identify a destination. At the moment we have government and private sector entities doing their own separate things and there’s no consensus on what the destination brand 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. A keen runner, this year Glenn won the men’s Faculty and Staff 1500m race at the University of Macau’s annual sports day.’