The good, the bad and the ugly at Resorts World opening

This correspondent made the trek to Resorts World Sentosa to bring you the first business review of the new casino.

Whilst it's true I did make the trek to Sentosa, and the almost 400 metre trek from one end of the carpark to the escalator, I did not, in fact, manage to enter the casino halls. The queues were just too long. In fact the double queuing system, where people had to wait upstairs for an hour, only to descend the escalators and find there was another queue of an hour about which they were not pre informed, left many a bad taste in punters mouths.

With little protection from the sun and no water offered to patrons trapped in the queue system, patrons were left with little option but to sweat it out or quit after an hour of waiting on finding there would be another hour of waiting. We chose the latter. Some better direction from management rather than leaving everything to the security team may have at least informed or placated frustrated and thirsty queuers.

So we cannot give you an inside glimpse of the casino or tell you how many of the visitors were playing the tables or which tables they were playing. But we can give some interesting first impressions of who was there and what this may mean for the Casino.

First off, there clearly were not a lot of Singaporeans or Permanent Residents there. They have a separate queue to pay the $100 entry fee, which was mercifully short, and which many a punter in the foreigner queue would have gladly paid just to get into the place rather than wait the two hours. So no doubt if the place wasn’t full of Singaporeans on Chinese New Year, it probably never will be. There was a VIP section in the car park, and there were a number of cars in it, so presumably they were the pre identified local ‘whales’.

Now to the foreigners. We spent a good hour in the queue so got to see pretty closely who was going in. Mainly it seemed to be mainland Chinese tourist families here for Chinese new year, who would have made up at least 90 per cent of the foreigner queue. There did seem to be a number of foreign workers also lining up, as well as the occasional angmoh. There were also a lot of Kappa branded polo shirts.

This raises two questions for Resorts World and its shareholders. The first is whether the 2 hour long queues are representative of final demand post opening and post Chinese New Year. If so, well at least the Casino will get a lot of people through the door. Unfortunately if the number of mainland Chinese citizens, who seemingly made up 9 in ten people waiting to get in, were most likely in Singapore for the Chinese New Year break, and going forward the number of them who will turn up to the casino is ultimately going to be constrained by the capacity on all the flights from China. To the extent that the opening of casinos boosts air traffic from China to Singapore, that would be a good thing. But it is interesting to note that we cannot recall a single Malaysian plated car in the car park so at this stage it looks like the Malaysians are not self driving to Singapore to go to the Casino.

The next question is whether the people in the foreigners queue are actually going to be big gamblers. Again, not to judge a book by its cover, but the queues looked more like they were made up of holiday family makers rather than committed gamblers. Perhaps it was the tourist attraction element that came in for the opening weekend, with the gamblers to come later. Again it's hard to say because we never made it to the casino floor to take a take of how many tables were operating and how many high stakes tables in particular were busy.

Once we left the queue we did a quick tour of the forecourt and then inside. Let's just get this out of the way and say that the main forecourt area is ugly. Sure it has a canopy like that at Clarke Quay, but with no ventilation system and hardly any trees in sight, it is one large expanse of concrete which could have been done a lot better with rows of trees and perhaps planter boxes with flowers. Inside the whole development gets a lot better. It’s not Takashimiya, but it's not bad either, with a number of up market shops spread out in a semi circle leading to different hotels. Most of the brands in the Casino are the same as found in main street so it will never be a shopping destination in its own right, but there are enough watch shops to sway a winning gambler.

The net picture will not be clear for a few more months yet, but we would be interested to see turnover figures for the Casino from the first weekend, and see whether all those queuers turned into profitable customers.