Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2011 12 North Korea’s ‘Dear Leader’ Kim Jong-il—out to spoil your casino holiday? Postcards from the Edge South Korea already has a mini-Macau; it’s just not very successful—so far T he South Korean government is also looking at another possible location for IRs. It’s well away from the hotspot of the DMZ and off the southern coast of the Korean peninsula. Jeju Island already has eight foreigners-only casinos, but they’re mainly boutique affairs. When the current inventory of Jeju’s casinos is combined, it amounts to around 197 slot machines and 178 tables. Kangwon Land on its own has 960 slots and 132 tables. “The economy on Jeju is dying,” says an industry source. “There also used to be a lot of Taiwanese visiting because Jeju— like Macau—used to be a transit point for Taiwanese travelling to mainland China. That was in the days when they couldn’t fly direct. Sometimes they would stay a night or two in Jeju. Now with direct flights [available since 2008], there’s no need. “The Japanese used to go there because it’s close by. But Jeju didn’t improve its tourism product, and so the Japanese got bored and stopped coming,” adds the source. “Jeju is also a special semi-autonomous zone, so it’s visa-free for Chinese visitors—unlike the rest of Korea. “There was a plan to build an internationally branded theme park on Jeju. I’ve heard there may be fresh moves to get it going. That would be part of an overall plan to revitalise Jeju as a tourism destination.” As IAG reported in our November 2010 edition, Jeju has also been touted as a possible destination for the extension of domestic gaming. The thinking seems to be that like Kangwon Land, it’s far enough away from main population centres to create disincentives for problem gamblers. missiles over the border, it would put a crimp in anybody’s casino holiday. This is not purely hyperbole. In mid-June, jumpy South Korean troops fired small arms rounds at an Asiana commercial airliner approaching Seoul Incheon, thinking it was a hostile North Korean military plane. It later emerged they were acting on orders that gave them permission to engage without reference to senior officers. Those orders were issued following the North’s artillery bombardment of the South Korean Island of Yeonpyeong in November 2010, in which four people died and 19 were injured. To give a sense of South Korea’s constant state of alert over its loopy neighbour, on the front page of the KTO website is an announcement warning visitors about a scheduled civil defence drill. It’s not exactly the kind of enticement that would appeal to the average Western holidaymaker. “The government wants gaming investors to go to Incheon City, but so far there have been no firm expressions of interest,” says an industry source. reinforced by the fact the South Korean governmentwouldapparentlyprefertobuild at least one and possibly two IRs in Incheon City, approximately 16 miles southwest of the capital Seoul. This makes sense in terms of international flight connections, but not much sense in other ways. First the positive aspects: Seoul Incheon International Airport is only one hour’s flying time from Beijing, one hour from Shanghai and one and a half hours from Tokyo Narita. It is not only the eighth busiest airport in the world measured by international passengers—with nearly 22 million in 2010—but also one of the most popular with travellers. For the past three years it has been voted among the top three airports in the world in a passenger survey compiled by Skytrax for the World Airport Awards—and took top spot in 2009. Now for the downside: Seoul and Incheon are both in the far northwest of the country, fewer than 40 miles from the DMZ—the Demilitarized Zone that marks the border with North Korea. If the Hermit Kingdom decided to lob some ballistic Cover Story