South Korean airport to lure Chinese with S’pore-style resort

SEOUL — Incheon Airport, the gateway to Seoul, is planning a tourism project to emulate Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore that aims to lure Chinese gamblers with a new casino, shopping mall and hotels.

The project may cost 5 trillion to 6 trillion won (S$6.3 billion to S$7.6 billion), Mr Lim Byung Kee, an official at Incheon International Airport Corp, said in an interview. The airport is looking to receive proposals to build the facilities and sign deals this year, he added.

“We have benchmarked Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore for the integrated resort project here. We want to attract more visitors from China, taking advantage of the close distance,” Mr Lim said.

Incheon Airport, about two hours by plane from Shanghai or Beijing, is competing with Singapore and the Philippines to woo China’s growing middle classes. It also hopes to draw gamblers who have helped make Macau the world’s largest casino hub and who are now looking for alternative gaming markets as China’s anti-graft campaign drives away bettors.

If all goes as planned, the Incheon Airport project could be ready by 2019, said Mr Lim, executive director of the airport’s city development division. The casino will only allow foreigners; only one casino in Korea is currently open to locals.

South Korea’s government expects to draw 10 million Chinese visitors a year by 2020, up from 6.13 million last year, according to data from Korea Tourism Organisation. The country has allowed construction of two more integrated resorts this year to attract tourists as Japanese lawmakers are trying to legalize casinos and new venues are opening in the Philippines.

Resorts World Sentosa, the Singapore integrated gambling resort run by Genting Singapore, has a convention centre, hotels and a Universal Studios theme park. It is one of two integrated casino resorts – the other being Marina Bay Sands – that opened in 2010 that have helped attract more tourists to the city state.

The integrated casino resort at Incheon will be developed on 809 acres of empty land near the construction site for a second passenger terminal, Mr Lim said. Local and overseas companies have expressed interest in investing in the project, he said, without naming them.

“It will be very important to make integrated resorts into attractive landmarks to bring in tourists, like what was done in Singapore,” said Professor Song Hak Jun, a professor in the hotel and convention management department at Pai Chai University in Daejon, South Korea. “It can’t just be about casinos.”

Three integrated casino resorts are already being built in the vicinity of the airport near Seoul. The Incheon project, which will be built on a man-made island 52 kilometres from the capital, would be the fourth resort.

Opened in 2001, Incheon was the world’s top airport by sales at duty-free shops last year.

“We don’t want to just focus on high rollers, but we also want mass consumers to visit the integrated resort. We want to use the resort to help create more traffic into the airport,” Prof Lim said. BLOOMBERG