Resort will be foreigners-only, like all but one of Korea’s casinos
Incheon International Airport is planning a tourist destination to rival Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore, according to multiple media reports. Like so many other markets in Asia and around the world, Incheon, considered the gateway to Seoul, hopes to attract Chinese travelers looking for fun outside Macau. Incheon Airport is about two hours by air from Shanghai and Beijing.
Bloomberg News reports the project may cost 5 trillion won (US $4.6 billion) to 6 trillion won.
“We have benchmarked Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore for the integrated resort project here,” said airport official Lim Byung Kee. “We want to attract more visitors from China, taking advantage of the close distance.”
The airport hopes to sign a development deal this year and open its resort by 2019, said Lim, executive director of the airport’s city development division. This casino, like 16 others in Korea, will only allow foreigners (there is one casino in the country that caters to locals). But Lim added the casino hopes to draw mass-market players as well as VIPs.
“We don’t want to just focus on high rollers, but we also want mass consumers to visit the integrated resort,” Lim said. “We want to use the resort to help create more traffic into the airport.”
