City of Dreams Sri Lanka opens with Melco and John Keells

City of Dreams Sri Lanka opens with Melco and John Keells

City of Dreams Sri Lanka opens with Melco and John Keells

 Sri Lanka's Melco Resorts and John Keells Holdings (JKH) opened the first part of a new resort development.  In Phase 2, a casino and other facilities that aren't related to gambling will be added.

 Sri Lanka's main city, Colombo, got Cinnamon Life at City of Dreams on October 15.  The 687-room hotel is the first part of a bigger integrated resort (IR) that will cost $1.2bn (£921.7m/€1.107bn).

 Melco runs IRs in Macau, the Philippines, and Cyprus as well. These are all called City of Dreams.

 The Sri Lanka IR has the biggest meeting centre in the port city, with room for up to 5,000 people.  In Phase 2, there will be a casino run by Melco, a shopping district, and a hotel with the Nuwa name.  All of them will open around the middle of 2025.

 A "small bet" for Melco
 The company Melco said in April that it had won a 20-year gaming contract from the Sri Lankan government.  It "will fit out and run the gaming area... and manage the top five floors of the hotel under [Melco's] Nuwa brand of ultra-high-end luxury rooms" in exchange.

 Melco is putting about $125 million into building up the betting area.  He calls it a "small bet" that could pay off big, says chairman and CEO Lawrence Ho.  Ho thinks that the casino will make $250 million a year in gross gaming revenue (GGR) when it is fully operating.

 Ho is sure that City of Dreams Sri Lanka will bring more tourists to the area.  "We hope to have a big and good effect on the community and economy here," he said in a statement.  "We think Sri Lanka has a lot of potential, and this chance fits in well with the properties we already own."

 Ho also said that the resort could grow if there was enough demand.  

 City of Dreams was compared to Singapore's International Airport. JKH chairman and CEO Krishan Balendra called it "an iconic development" that could be a "transformative development in South Asia and be a catalyst in creating tourism demand, foreign exchange earnings for Sri Lanka and employment."  He thinks it will be as good for Colombo as Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa were for Singapore.

 He said that when those IRs opened in 2010, "there was an immediate surge in tourist arrivals to Singapore."  "The effect has been good in other Asian cities like Manila, where similar integrated resorts have opened."