Inside Asian Gaming

30 Conference and exhibition organisers have been put off Singapore by the relative scarcity and expense of the city’s international standard hotel rooms. year fall in receipts from its hotel rooms of 11.8% and in food and beverage outlets of 14.2%, and only a modest growth (3.6%) in its shopping mall receipts. Off the casino floor So where will the supporting revenue streams for the Singapore casino industry come from? Two of the much-vaunted sources (aside from the luxury hotels at both resorts) are the Universal Studios theme park at Resorts World Sentosa (RWS), and the meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions (MICE) trade at both RWS and Marina Bay Sands (MBS). But RWS and MBS are between them only adding around 4,300 hotel rooms to the Singapore market, yet are claiming they can increase Singapore’s daily MICE attendance capacity by 80,000. Do those two sets of figures stack up when it comes to building Singapore’s MICE sector? It certainly seems unlikely that the injection of a modest amount of hotel capacity in tandem with a major increase Purpose of Visit, 2005-2008 100 80 60 40 20 0 (%) Source: STB Annual Report on Tourism Statistics 2008 2005 2006 2007 2008 Exdudes 2008 FORMULA 1 st visitors’profile Others Visiting Friends / Relatives Business / MICE Holiday 28 15 27 30 37 28 13 22 21 10 29 40 39 30 12 19 Integrated Resorts’MICE & Hotel Capacity Operator MICE capacity Hotel rooms Marina Bays Sands 45,000 2,500+ Resorts World Sentosa 35,000 1,800 Cross sectional rendering of the MICE facilities at Marina Bay Sands