Hotel booked through February
Visits to Russia’s Primorye area rose 18.5 percent in 2015 to almost 365,000 foreign visitors, according to CalvinAyre.com. It’s due in part to the opening of Summit Ascent’s Tigre de Cristal integrated resort near Vladivostok, which opened in early October. Since the opening, local tourism head Konstantin Shestakov said, more than 30,000 tourists have visited the Primorye enterprise zone, one of only four regions in Russia where casinos are legal.
Sixty-one percent of those tourists hailed from China, South Korea or Japan, in line with the resort’s target demographic. Shestakov told the Russian news agency Ria Novosti that Tigre de Cristal’s 121-room hotel is sold out through the end of February, a period that includes the Lunar New Year, a major holiday.
According to the Moscow Times, Tigre de Cristal, the first casino in the Primorye and the largest in Russia, is expected to boost the development of tourism and economic growth in the vicinity, and contribute 1 billion rubles (US$16 million) in new taxes.
Along with the casino, the 620-hectare (1,532-acre) zone will eventually include 15 hotels, 12 guest villas, a yacht club and a convention center, among other attractions. The project is due to be complete in 2022.
