Inside Asian Gaming

FEBRUARY 2018 INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 15 COVER STORY Muhammad Cohen: How has Asian gaming shifted the paradigm for integrated resort design? Paul Steelman: The creation of the Macau integrated resorts has changed everyone’s thinking towards gambling in a big way. One of the big things is that in Las Vegas we would make one very large room and then maybe a smaller baccarat room or something of this nature. What Macau and Las Vegas Sands brought about was the era of the stratified casino where the casino was designed in five or six market segments. That has changed the IRs significantly, it has changed the buildings significantly, it has changed profitability significantly and it has changed the diversified set of operators that use any particular facility. Now you have a series of junket representatives as well as people involved in the gaming floors in unusual capacities. There are slot machine providers and utilizers, there are junket reps and there are the main casinos doing their own super high limit VIP business. What we found out from many of the Asian participants in this building was that they really wanted to be close to everything, whereas in a Las Vegas resort we pride ourselves on having one very large footplate where everyone can mingle and interact with one another. This has led us to a more vertical solution of casinos. We started at Sands Macao with our stadium casino and also our high limit rooms on multiple levels because of the site size, and then we’ve continued that practice to Galaxy, to Solaire, to Ho Tram in Vietnam and all of our projects here in Asia. “What Macau and Las Vegas Sands brought about was the era of the stratified casino where the casino was designed in five or six market segments. That has changed the IRs significantly.” The ground-breaking Sands Macao changed casino design across the globe