Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | October 2013 10 COVER STORY gaming tourist hotels in Goa and holds an equity interest in an Advani resort hotel in Daman, where Delta plans to add a casino to its own Thunderbird convention hotel complex. It’s the view of CFO Hardik Dhebar that “We have not even scratched the surface yet” in terms of regional gaming opportunities, as he told Bloomberg some time ago, and Sri Lanka figures prominently in the company’s plans as it dearly would like to secure an industry name or two as investors. In India this is forbidden by law, but in Sri Lanka Delta owns two small gambling venues in Colombo (one of them the strangely named “Bellagio”) and controls four acres of land in the capital for which it’s looking for partners to help fund something a bit more like the real Bellagio with a 150,000-square-foot casino and a 500-room hotel. This would appear to mesh nicely with Mr Rajapaksa’s larger ambitions for it states in its five-year master plan for the industry. It’s an assessment that finds the market short about 22,000 of the 45,000 rooms the ministry believes it needs, a goal that might gently be termed quixotic at this point. Several global brands are investing in new product or planning to invest in it or manage it—Shangri-la, Avani, Six Senses, Hyatt, Marriott, Mövenpick, Starwood, Onyx, ITC—but this will add at most about 5,000 rooms, according to HVS, assuming everything gets built. For Mahinda and Basil Rajapaksa— brothers Gotabhaya and Chamal are, respectively, minister of Defense and speaker of the Parliament, Mahinda also has a son who is a sitting MP, he’s got a nephew serving as a provincial chief minister and another on the board of directors of SriLankan Airlines, whose chairman is his brother-in-law, the ambassadors to Russia and the United States are cousins—this is precisely where casinos fit in. Plans, Problems Not a lot of detail is available on the Crown and John Keells resorts, which may be by design until the government is comfortable that the Buddhist clergy, the most powerful political faction after its own People’s Alliance coalition, are on board. What is known is that both will be built along Beira Lake in the center of Colombo just back from the beaches and the popular Galle Face promenade. News his country. Perennially rated one of the world’s top destinations by the likes of Lonely Planet , Conde Nast and The New York Times , the “Pearl of the Indian Ocean,” as the island is known, certainly offers no end of delights for the traveler—hundreds of miles of beaches, tropical forests, lush, unspoiled highland valleys, stunning waterfalls, 15 national parks, botanical gardens, sprawling plantations where those legendary Ceylon teas are grown , centuries- old temples, ornate colonial-era landmarks, eight UNESCO World Heritage sites, even wild elephants—but what it doesn’t have is anywhere near enough tourist-caliber hotel rooms to accommodate the government’s target of 2.5 million visitor arrivals by 2016. And the Ministry of Economic Development is rather blunt about “attracting the right type of tourists,” too. “It is important that the country moves away from the low-cost tourism and focuses on high-end tourism,” KPMG estimated that US$60 billion was wagered on the subcontinent in 2010, most of that flowing through various black markets. As Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, the billionaire investor known as the “Warren Buffett of India” has observed, “Indians are prone to gambling as much as the Chinese.” Perennially rated one of the world’s top destinations by the likes of Lonely Planet and The New York Times , Sri Lanka offers no end of delights for the traveler—but what it doesn’t have is anywhere near enough star-quality hotel rooms to accommodate the government’s target of 2.5 million visitor arrivals by 2016.