Parisian Macau Casino Resort Opens Tonight

The Parisian Macau, opens tonight amid a $31.5 million marketing blitz. (Image: Las Vegas Sands)

Sheldon Adelson’s lavish $2.7 billion casino resort on Macau’s Cotai Strip, the , opens tonight, complete with 3,000 rooms, hundreds of shops, a theater, a water park and an obligatory half-sized Eiffel Tower replica.

Around 500 journalists descended on the gambling hub for the opening night, most of them from publications based in mainland China, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan and Australia.

Among them was the Las Vegas Review Journal, which reported that the marketing blitz is everywhere, on “every electronic display along the Cotai Strip,” and “in videos shown on the hydrofoil ferries that carry thousands of travelers to Macau from Hong Kong every day.”

It’s clear that LVS is thinking big for its fifth property in the former Portuguese colony, and spending big: at its last quarterly earnings report the company said it would spend $31.5 million in pre-opening expenses alone.

The hopes are that the new casino will help to grow the market and attract the Chinese middle class back to the gambling hub, which last month reported its first month of growth, following 25 consecutive months of spiraling revenue.

has said that he believes the Macau economy has begun to stabilize after an unprecedented anti-corruption crackdown in Beijing, launched in 2014, scared off high rollers visiting from the mainland.

In addition, a slowing Chinese economy stemmed the flow of the burgeoning middle class from mainland China.   

“The positioning of The Parisian Macau caters well to both the current Macao market conditions and the long term growth trends in Chinese outbound tourism,” he said recently.

“The Parisian will be a themed premium destination where the aspirational appeal of its public spaces, attractions and amenities, combined with affordable hotel accommodation, will provide a complimentary offering to the all-suite hotel at The Venetian Macao.”

“I m extremely confident that with the opening of The Parisian, we will see growth in Macau,” he added.

But not everyone is so sure. The Parisian is the third casino to open in the last 12 months, after Lawrence Ho and James Packer’s Studio City and Steve Wynn’s Wynn Palace, while Galaxy Entertainment completed phase 2 on Galaxy Macau. These properties were conceived prior to the economic slowdown, when Macau was being hailed as “one of the world’s fastest-growing economies” by Forbes.   

Some analysts are warning that Macau’s newest properties may struggle in the market, at least initially.

We believe it is much more difficult to ramp up a new property in a low growth environment, based on Studio City s and Galaxy Macau Phase 2 s performances, said Praveen Choudhary, analyst at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong.