Richard N. Velotta
VEGAS INC Coverage
Sheldon Adelson rarely gets much credit for some of the things he does because he has a cantankerous way about him and a lot of people simply don’t like him. He’s one of the founders of the idea that if you build a convention center and sell enough organizations on meeting there, you can fill your expensive hotel—and your casino—on weekdays while leisure travelers fill it on weekends. He did that with the Sands Expo Center in Las Vegas with the Venetian and the Palazzo. He’s doing it in Macau with the Venetian Macao. But he saved his best effort for last in Singapore, where he’s doing it again with the Marina Bay Sands, which opened a little more than a year ago.
I’ve seen many extraordinary places in my travels, but the Marina Bay Sands blew me away when I visited last week.
When the elevator doors open on the 57th floor, the first thing you see is the 450-foot infinity swimming pool, the world’s largest outdoor pool at that height. The pool seemingly drops off into the skyline of Singapore’s skyscraper-filled financial district. The Sands SkyPark covers the space of about three football fields and includes that wondrous pool, three lounges and restaurants, a landscaped garden with 250 trees and 650 plants and a public observation deck that can accommodate hundreds of people at once. The Sands SkyPark rests atop three hotel towers that contain 2,500 rooms and suites. One side of the hotel faces the heart of Singapore; the other, the harbor where ships are at anchor, awaiting their time to offload their goods from all corners of the world.
The hotel has sloping towers and straight legs connected at the 23rd floor to form a single room. In one tower, the slope is as much as 26 degrees. Clearly, it was an engineering challenge. It’s also clear that the government of Singapore, notorious for its attention to long-term planning detail, has to be happy with the end result of the Marina Bay Sands as a key component of its new tourism strategy.
Singapore Flyer’s A Bore
The builders of Las Vegas’ competing observation wheels should take a look at the Singapore Flyer to get some ideas on how not to develop the attraction. Since we’re apparently getting a similar attraction in Las Vegas, I decided to take the Singapore version, located right next door to the Marina Bay Sands, for a spin.
The concept is very simple: Board the glass-lined cars of the slow-moving wheel at the bottom, rise to the high point in about 15 minutes and you’re down and done in 30 minutes. There’s a plastic block inside every compartment that isn’t comfortable for sitting. That means 30 minutes of standing and watching during the single orbit. In my compartment, there was a Chinese-speaking family of 12, so there was little opportunity for conversation.
The developers of the Singapore Flyer invested heavily in an elaborate pre-boarding display that promised the thrill of a lifetime on this “flight.” But it was a yawner from the beginning. Somebody, please tell me the Las Vegas version(s) will be better.
Casinos: Singapore Sting
Ever since I learned that Singapore was going to charge the equivalent of about $100 per person or $2,000 a year for its citizens to enter one of the two casinos that were built as part of the nation’s tourism development strategy, I wondered how exactly the government was going to do it. The casinos at the Marina Bay Sands and the Resorts World Sentosa have single entrances that are reminiscent of immigration and naturalization entrances at a country’s port of entry. There are lines for Singapore residents and lines for foreigners. Everybody shows a passport to get in. Foreigners are checked to make sure they’re who they say they are. Singaporeans have a more elaborate process, with officials having to check whether the local resident has paid the admittance fee.
The gaming floor is pretty similar to other casinos in Asian countries, with table games in the middle and slot machines along the periphery. Baccarat dominates the floor, but there’s blackjack, craps, poker games, Caribbean Stud and roulette. There are a few games you won’t find much in the United States—pontoon (which is like Spanish 21) and sic bo, an easy-to-learn dice game.
They also serve drinks on the floor. Every 15 minutes or so, a casino employee wheels a cart through the aisles with plastic bottles of water.