Australia’s casino resorts target affluent Chinese tourists

With the number of Chinese visitors to Australia reaching the one million-mark, The Star Entertainment Group has called for an investment boost in southeast Queensland in order to establish the region as a haven for affluent Chinese and Indian tourists.
The Star’s Chief Executive Officer Matt Bekier declared that infrastructure must be upgraded, suggesting that new restaurants and six-star hotels be built to sustain tourism in the region, adding that the state should prepare for a boom in tourism as the mining industry declines.
“The reality is we need to have a lot more hotel competition, partners that have the capability to sell those rooms,” he said at a lunch for the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
“As people become more affluent, their behaviors change — they want to have experiences,” he stressed, adding that a tourism boom would be about experiences as well as commodities.
The Star Entertainment Group has reportedly captured up to 20 percent of the region’s Chinese tourism, and is considering further investment in its Gold Coast site to add rooms before the 2018 Commonwealth Games, according to The Australian.
Such a boom would present a major opportunity for all of southeast Queensland, and Bekier believes that the city can compete with the world’s largest gaming hubs.
“We need other people to build more hotels, more tourist attractions, more food and beverage options [in] places other than Tangalooma. We are working with the tourism industry to try and activate the sector so we can sell all of southeast Queensland, offering an authentic, unique proposition that allows us to compete with Melbourne, Macau and Singapore,” Bekier added.