Inside Asian Gaming

August 2013 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 11 COVER STORY the relationship with CEO Lloyd Nathan was disintegrating. Then 2013 arrived and a planned Lunar New Year opening came and went. Mr Nathan, who had been with the project since 2010, was gone not long after. He claims he was forced out, and he’s suing Bob Wolfe and Phil Falcone and Pinnacle CEO Anthony Sanfilippo. In March, MGM jumped ship. Maybe it was the investment certificate, maybe it was the problems with Mr Nathan, an admired former executive who at one time had headed the gaming giant’s global development arm, maybe both. At any rate, before the investment certificate finally came through in April it wasn’t looking good. The July opening wasn’t announced until June. “There were many people who probably thought it might never happen,” says COO Mike Santangelo, who was brought on in March from The Cosmopolitan on the Las Vegas Strip, where he was vice president of finance. Mr Wolfe will tell you The Grand’s troubles are behind it and the financial ground beneath it is solid. “I’m not going to give you the mix of our senior bank versus equity,” he says, “but we are heavily balanced toward equity in our structure. We’re far from over-levered. We have considerable room on our senior debt. We have ongoing dialogue with our banks about how we can expand, and our equity investors have provided commitments for additional capital to build out the rest of this project and into our next phase.” Construction began on that next phase last fall. Plans call for 559 hotel rooms and 14 luxury villas to open in 2017 along with a second casino that will bring the gaming complement to Vietnam’s legal limit of 180 live tables and 2,000 slots and EGMs. Pinnacle will be the operator. There’s a lot of room to play with beyond that. The 164-hectare site is configured for three more hotels or some variation, possibly involving a high-end residential and/or luxury time-share component. Critical mass will be ACDL’s answer to the government’s ban on casino gambling by its own citizens and the challenge of being a good two to three hours’drive through the congested port lands of Ho Chi Minh City from the only international airport in the south of the country. Nor does it enjoy the proximity to China of its smaller competitors in the resort hotels in Da Nang and up on picturesque Halong Bay and the border casinos in the northeast and above Hanoi in the far northwest. If it can work through all this, though, it has the product to capture an outsized share of a tourism market that currently exceeds 4 million leisure travelers a year. International arrivals to Vietnam were up 14% in 2012 to almost 7 million visitors across all categories. The government expects that to reach 10 million by 2020. What is true of The Grand at this point is that you can drive three hours or you can drive for a day, there is nothing at the end of any road in Vietnam to compare with it. Nestled amid gently rolling hills and protected forest it straddles one of the prettiest beaches in the country. Its heart lies in the Club Med ambiance of its outdoor pool area, where you can lounge in a cabana or saunter up to the bar for a glass of something with an umbrella in it or stroll down to the beach to watch the surfers and kayakers and parasailers. It’s carried throughout the property on the warmth of the Steelman Partners design—spacious, airy, basking in natural light—and it’s there in the restaurants and the world-class spa. The Grand takes you up in a relaxed embrace. It’s a feel that distinguishes it from much of Asia’s current resort gaming product. There If The Grand can work through the location issues it has the product to capture an outsized share of a market that currently exceeds 4 million leisure travelers a year. International arrivals to Vietnam were up 14% last year to almost 7 million visitors across all categories. The government expects that to reach 10 million by 2020.