Five years after its opening on April 27, 2010, Marina Bay Sands remains the integrated resort every government official wants to bring to their hometown, with the profits every owner wants in his financial report. The Las Vegas Sands property wasn’t the first casino resort in Singapore, but it was still a groundbreaker for the nation-state and the global gaming industry.
Genting Group’s Resort World Sentosa grabbed the honors as the first integrated resort in Singapore, opening 10 weeks ahead of Marina Bay Sands. But RWS (embracing Singapore’s passion for three-letter acronyms) is on an island off the southern coast of Singapore. MBS, the largest hotel in Singapore with 2,561 rooms, is smack in the middle of town. It’s a part of town that wasn’t really on the map when I first tried to visit in 2007 – no one could tell me how to get to what was then urban wilderness – but it has since been well connected via the Double Helix Bridge as part of the riverside circuit and the MRT urban mass transit rail system.
Marina Bay Sands is a hotel, casino, shopping mall, convention center, learning and performance hub... [+]
MBS also connected to its host city in another key way even before it opened, Singaporean independent scholar Derek da Cunha says. “Las Vegas Sands and Marina Bay Sands played their cards better, had a better feel for local people,” da Cunha, author of Singapore Places Its Bets, says. “All their recruitment drives were looking for local Singaporeans. [LVS chairman] Sheldon Adelson had a firm finger on the pulse of Singapore politics.”
Moreover, while Resorts World Sentosa has a number of compelling attractions, from Southeast Asia’s only Universal Studio theme park to public art by giants such as Rodin and Dali, it has the overall aesthetic of a highway rest stop. MBS is one of the world’s architectural marvels.
Designed by noted architect Moshe Safdie, the three 57 story hotel towers slope at angles as steep as 26 degrees. The straight legs are connected at the 23rd floor and linked more noticeably at the top by the 3 acre (1.2 hectare) SkyPark, the size of three football fields, towering 656 feet (200 meters) above Marina Bay. The rooftop infinity pool, nearly 500 feet long, has become world famous for selfies with a splash, and the observation deck extends over the easternmost tower like the prow of an aircraft carrier. When Singapore’s famously loquacious founding father Lee Kuan Yew first saw SkyPark, he managed only an awestruck “Wow.”
Like any worthy wonder of the world, MBS has generated its share of mythology. The three towers supposedly represent Adelson’s position as the world’s third richest man prior to the 2008 crash. LVS purportedly never expected it would need to build the SkyPark, but Singapore authorities insisted on getting the building on blueprints, forcing LVS to solve one of the world’s most difficult engineering challenges. But Marina Bay Sands’ realities are far more compelling. Forty million people visited MBS last year, an average of 110,000 daily. At $5.7 billion, it is the most expensive standalone casino resort ever built. With 2014 net revenue of $3.2 billion and Ebitda of $1.7 billion, a 53.6% margin, it’s likely the most profitable.
The real contribution of MBS to the evolution of the art of casino resort development is that it offers a premium product (at prices to match) without gimmicks or apologies. The MBS roster of celebrity chefs lifted Singapore, already one of the world’s great places for eating, to new heights. The tiered gaming floor with its golden glow is a spectacularly fresh rendition of something that’s been a million times before, as is the shopping mall with oodles of natural light and cityscape as a backdrop for virtually every luxury brand imaginable. The ArtScience Museum’s Titanic exhibition that simulated strolling across the deck on a bracing North Atlantic evening as well as trawling the ocean floor for the ship’s remains, reconstructed the ocean liner’s grand staircase and gave attendees a passenger ticket to check against the rolls of survivors, set a curatorial standard that staff meet with each new show. And when the rains come and the plaza separating the lotus shaped museum from the main towers seems impassable, a MBS staffer appears with umbrellas to shuttle guests across.
MBS isn’t perfect. Its huge scale and hard surfaces can make the place seem cold and daunting, especially without hundreds of people knocking around to humanize it. Guest rooms are ordinary. But overall, MBS is what Singapore and LVS wanted: unique, one of a kind, like no place else on earth. Marina Bay Sands exemplifies the word iconic.
