Travel is Big Business in Macau

I always like to travel without benefit of a tour guide, with my wife and myself just rattling around on our own. Even without the benefit of a guide (or even the ability to speak Cantonese), we’re able to find much more in Macau to enjoy. And even though the restaurants listed in the published guides are wonderful, we found the best Portuguese food, the best Macanese food, the best egg tarts and the best dim sum just by stumbling across it. But, that’s just me—plenty of people enjoy packaged tours and this seems to be a big business, especially in places like Macau.

One thing you’ll notice when walking around Senado Square and other popular destinations is small groups of people with cameras, following a leader who is holding up a national flag. The purpose of the flag of course, is so the members of the group can easily spot their leader if they get off course. Just over the course of a single afternoon, I saw groups from Ireland, Thailand, England and a few other places whose flags I couldn’t identify.

This month, Macau Success Limited (00487.HK) announced that it would buy privately-held Smart Class Enterprises Limited for HK$22.62 million through a share exchange. The biggest attraction of Smart Class for Macau Success, is that it owns 80% of Jade Travel Group. Jade travel is an air travel consolidator with offices in Canada and New York City, with several packages to various destinations across Asia.

My home when I’m not living in Bangkok or wandering across Asia is South Bend, Indiana, and outside of weekends when there is a Notre Dame football home game, we don’t get many tourists. In fact, Americans (at least the middle-class ones I hang out with) just can’t afford to do much traveling. But that observation hasn’t stopped the flow of tourists into Macau.

Casino operators pay attractive commissions to junket operators who bring them gamblers, and in fact, the commission scheme has become so competitive, the Macau SAR government initiated a meeting to try to control the rates. At the meeting, casino tycoon Stanley Ho set the tone, saying that the only way to curb cutthroat competition is by restricting the number of gaming tables, and restricting the commissions for junket operators. Most operators agreed with Ho, except for the representative from the Sands, who argued that the market should decide the rates.

And although you can’t help but have respect for a man like Ho, the Sands’ Stephen Weaver made a valid point when he said that operators who build casinos “which are just casinos” don’t meet the needs of Macau as a society. A report in the People’s Daily Online reported Weaver saying, “What we think Macao is a society and the government’s intention of opening up the industry was to bring in the kinds of resorts that would attract new tourism traffic, business traffic, people who want to come for shopping, entertainment and so on.” And I think all casino operators in Macau, even Ho, can agree with his sentiment — a building with a bunch of gaming tables and dealers doesn’t make a casino, and the gambling alone isn’t what brings in tourists by the boatload and boosts the travel industry. It’s the combination of casinos and gambling, along with high-end retail, entertainment, 5-star restaurants, and architectural eye-candy like the Venetian and the Lisboa.