Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming March 2015 26 Insights “If you want a place where the property itself is a destination, I think that’s our main calling card. The beauty of our surroundings, the lavishness, the über-quality. You know, once you step inside Solaire, it’s that expression, you’re living large.” the Metro Manila area but also the entire Philippines. Until recently, when Solaire was the only property here, it was a tougher challenge than it’s going to be now with CoD open, and three, four, five years from now, with at least two more integrated resorts open in Entertainment City. That gravitational pull down here is going to become much stronger, and the ballast if you will, the center of entertainment in the Philippines, is going to be right here in Entertainment City. And, if we’re going to get competitors, I sort of like some of the guys that are coming in. CoD, no question, they’ll have some really good pull in from China. [Universal Entertainment Chairman Kazuo Okada’s] Manila Bay Resorts, they ought to be strong in northern Asia, Japan and Korea. So from a long-term perspective, I’m very willing to deal with the inevitable short-term competitive pressure by making this one of the awesome critical masses. When you think about it, the [other] critical masses are going to be Macau and the Las Vegas Strip. What will make people choose Solaire, not just over Philippine competitors, but convince them to choose Manila instead of Phnom Penh or Ho Tram or Singapore? If you want a place where the property itself is a destination, I think that’s our main calling card. The beauty of our surroundings, the lavishness, the über-quality. You know, once you step inside Solaire, it’s that expression, you’re living large. It’s transformational. Whatever adjective you want to put to it: aspirational, living the fantasy, having an enveloping luxury experience. It’s living outside of the confines of your daily life, even for someone that’s of very substantial means. You walk into that Sky Tower lobby, and how often do you see something like that? How often do you see the waterfall and the greenery and, on the one hand, the serenity that is right there in the Sky Tower lobby, and walk another 30 or 40 meters and you’re there on the hopping casino floor? I think that distinction between the two is going to be a very nice juxtaposition for us. So if you want the frenetic environment on the gaming floor, you can do that. But if you really want to chill and enjoy and de-stress and detox, there are plenty of other places in Solaire where you can go. Solaire designed Sky Tower with bigger rooms rather than more of them. What does that say about how you want to position the product? It speaks loudly. We want to enhance what we think is our positioning as the No. 1 experience in the Philippines. But in strong terms I’d like to express to you that we do not define ourselves in purely a Philippine context. It’s not, absolutely not, where the vision starts and stops. The vision is a global position in the top echelon of available global IR experiences. That’s absolutely how we’re positioning ourselves. I think you see that in everything we’ve produced here. The customer is becoming increasingly global, has increasing choices, and that is a crowd that moves around, and we want to make sure we’re well-positioned for it.