Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JUL 2022年7月 亞博匯 38 year. Next on the agenda is a road and rail bridge effectively connecting the Cotai Strip with Zhuhai Jinwan Airport, cutting travel times to as little as 10 to 20 minutes once open in 2023. Looking ahead to a post- pandemic China, and with most of Hengqin’s major infrastructure projects soon to be completed, Ossolinski envisions implementation of a new visa system, perhaps a “joint special pass, where if you are a Chinese domestic tourist and you have a hotel booked on Hengqin you get unlimited entries into Macau for one week so you can pass back and forth freely between Hengqin and Macau. When they do something like that, that’s when they will truly be integrated.” It is this type of free cross- border travel that has Macau’s gaming operators looking to Hengqin as the future home of much-needed hotel room inventory. With free space at a premium, there is currently little scope to expand on the roughly 40,000 hotel rooms Macau currently offers, but there are already over 10,000 hotel rooms built out in Hengqin. Looking further ahead, Ossolinski tells IAG that Hengqin could have capacity for 100,000 hotel rooms in a decade, given plans to add additional land via a series of man-made islands. “The idea is that Hengqin will add tens of thousands of rooms to Cotai’s hotel room inventory,” says Ossolinski, “and those rooms are already being built.” Ossolinski also welcomes early moves by Macau’s concessionaires to plant a flag in Hengqin with a view to launching development projects of their own in the near future. While none of those concessionaires were willing to comment on their Hengqin plans when contacted by IAG , Galaxy Entertainment Group is known to own a plot of land measuring around one square mile and has made no secret of its intention to operate there in future. COVER STORY The total number of visitors during last year’s October Golden Week period exceeded 210,000. 2021年十一假期期間， 橫琴深 合區景區遊客接待總量突破21萬 人次。