Actual building work for the previously-flagged renovation of the Grand Lisboa casino hotel in downtown Macau is likely to start “next year”, said Daisy Ho Chiu Fung (pictured), chairman of the venue’s promoter SJM Holdings Ltd, in response to a question from GGRAsia on the sidelines of an event on Friday.
The revamp is currently at the planning stage, said the executive. She also confirmed it would involve some hotel-room refurbishment, addition of restaurants and plans for further shops. She was speaking at her company’s reception at the group’s Grand Lisboa Palace casino resort on Cotai, to mark the 74th anniversary earlier this month of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
Grand Lisboa’s “hotel room count we will maintain” at the same level post-renovation, stated Ms Ho. According to information from Macao Government Tourism Office, the property has 431 rooms and suites.
Grand Lisboa already has some restaurants, other food and drink outlets, jewellery retailers, and a gift shop, as well as several floors of casino games. The property additionally houses an outlet of the city’s sports-betting concessionaire, Macau SLOT Co Ltd.
The property was one of the first generation of large-scale, post-liberalisation casino hotel complexes in Macau, opening in stages from February 2007.
In the first half this year, Grand Lisboa generated gross revenue of HKD2.40 billion (US$306.5 million), including casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) of nearly HKD2.27 billion, and non-gaming revenue of HKD137 million. That is according to SJM Holdings’ first-half results issued in August.
That venue’s hotel occupancy rate for the six months to June 30 was 87.8 percent, with revenue per available room at HKD901.
At the Friday occasion, Ms Ho said her group would be “ready” to meet any additional concession-related investment as mandated by Macau’s government if the city’s annual GGR reaches MOP180-billion (US$22.3-billion) or above in any one year.
The six Macau concessionaires are required to increase their collective investment by up to 20 percent over the life of their current 10-year concessions, once the MOP180-billion threshold is achieved market-wide.
