Inside Asian Gaming

November 2008 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 19 Cover Story Mixed Feelings Macau may have its own motives for accepting the squeeze on Chinese travellers M acau remains geared up to act as a mousetrap for Asian gamblers and as a generator of MICE business as well. The city is, however, in a tricky position. It wants to build a world-class tourism and meetings market, but it knows it can’t do so at the expense of causing social trouble inside China. For its part, China appears generally happy for its Special Administrative Region to get on with running its own affairs—except that there’s a joker in the pack. Macau has had no problem attracting Chinese visitors— it’s just that so far it’s had too many of the wrong sort (i.e. poor people) and not enough of the right sort (the high spending professional and managerial classes). For quarter after quarter since 2007, government surveys have shown that 25% of all visitors to Macau are retired people, students and the unemployed. A further 20% plus are clerks and low-grade clerical staff. This is hardly the target audience likely to drive up average daily spending and length of average stay. A gambling home from home Policy makers in Macau and Beijing may not have reckoned on the deep appeal of gambling even to Chinese people with modest incomes and the lack—because of cost and visa issues—of alternative travel destinations outside China. The fact that Mainland visitors don’t need a passport to come to Macau, but can use their identity cards, and that the language and food are all comfortingly familiar, makes Macau the obvious destination for Chinese consumers taking their first uncertain steps outside the immediate borders of the ‘Middle Kingdom’—a society that had been in self-imposed isolation for centuries until the late 1970s. There was a feeling, however, even among ethnic Chinese executives in the industry, that eventually something more like a free market based on product pricing rather than permit rationing would be the norm, as Macau’s visitor footprint widened and the integrated resorts took the place more upmarket. If the Face Fits Macau needs more rich visitors and fewer poor ones The wrong sort of visitor T he visa issue is generally being viewed in the foreign media as something China is ‘doing’ to Macau. This may be misleading. Macau officials may have their own motives for welcoming travel restrictions. For some time they have been frustrated that Macau remained stubbornly a day trip market for low-spending visitors from Guangdong, rather than the truly international conference and holiday destination they dreamed of. A ‘must-visit’ city João Manuel Costa Antunes, director of the Macau Government Tourism Office, said recently after signing a deal to promote the city to visitors from the UK that the general aim was to make Macau a ‘must- visit’ destination on any Far East holiday and an ideal location for business events and conventions.