Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | November 2008 26 Cover Story go to the Grand Canal Shoppes it’s a lot more bustling, with tourists taking pictures everywhere. That’s great, but not what we were aiming at with the Four Seasons. We deliberately didn’t do big stores, we wanted it to be small in scale and have limited edition ranges. The idea is that as a customer you go in there and feel special, that you’re getting things you can’t get in Hong Kong or anywhere else in the world. “With [Cotai Strip™ plots] seven and eight,which we’ll be doing later on,we’re in discussions with Louis Vuitton for an 18,000 square feet store, and Chanel’s talking about 12,000 sq. ft, so in that property we’ll do a big, deep range [of branded products]. But for The Four Seasons, that’s not the market we’re going for. It’s [The Four Seasons] only a 360-room hotel, it’s six-star, and everything there is high end, so we want to keep it scalable so that it’s not overwhelming,” he emphasises. Loyalty links LVS also plans to offer the luxury brands the option of linking their PoS system to Sands’ own customer loyalty schemes. Outlets in The Venetian Macao such as Guess Jeans, Tommy Hilfiger and United Colors of Benetton are already part of a scheme called The Grand Canal Shoppes Shopping Club. The original version of the club, launched at The Venetian Las Vegas offers participants slot or table play credits as well as discount vouchers for food and drink. “We’re also about to start—especially with the luxury brands—having them gain access to our comping system,” explains Mr Sylvester. “We’re developing a one card system, where that card can used around the whole resort, and that card’s linked to everything that’s in the resort.” Old hat? According to the most recent figures from Mr Sylvester, 56% of the visitors to The Venetian are now from Hong Kong, a market that already has most of the high-end retail recently launched in Macau. Macau has no special retail price advantages compared to Hong Kong, other than perhaps slightly lower leasing overheads in some cases, as both jurisdictions are free of sales tax. How in those circumstances, do you persuade Hong Kongers to shop in Macau? “The interesting thing is that it [shopping] is endemic in Hong Kongers,” says Mr Sylvester. Shop and drop “They love to shop. It’s the culture in Hong Kong. You see it at weekends—it’s people’s leisure activity—you go to the shopping malls and shop. They also love coming here and shopping.We offer them a different environment to Hong Kong. “Hong Kong malls tend to be very generic,” adds Mr Sylvester. If you look at the fit out of them, they don’t even let the retailers do their own store front. They [the centre management] design the store front, they design the bulk head, they tell you you’ve got to put your sign in this zone, you’ve got to fit out behind this, so it’s unusual for them [the retailers] to come to an environment where we throw it [the rule book] away. We want the retailers to do what they do best, so we want them to be in charge of their fit out. So shoppers from Hong Kong come here and see a different sort of retail environment, and they shop. Our strongest market for sales is still Hong Kong shoppers.”