Location and accessibility remain the single most important competitive advantage in the gaming industry, and Vietnam’s infrastructure pipeline is poised to transform the catchment area of The Grand Ho Tram, CEO Walter Power said during the G2E Asia “Asia Gaming Talk: Marketplaces in Motion” panel.
A new international airport under construction in Ho Chi Minh City will sit just 40 minutes from the property, with a dedicated highway running directly from the airport to the resort. The current journey from Ho Chi Minh City takes roughly two hours.
“This will be a dramatic improvement when it opens next year,” Power said.
The demand-side fundamentals, Power argued, are unusually favorable. The Grand Ho Tram benefits from roughly 300,000 expatriates based in Ho Chi Minh City, alongside historical inbound flows from Korea, China, Taiwan, and the United States. Beyond that lies a structural scarcity: “It’s one casino for 20 million people — that’s the situation we face at Ho Tram.”
The accessibility story arrives alongside a separate but reinforcing development. The Grand Ho Tram was included in a five-year pilot program that opens the casino floor to Vietnamese citizens for the first time, ending a 13-year foreign-passport-only restriction. “I think this might be the first time in the industry that this has happened in Asia,” Power said.
The shift came with an operational overhaul. The property converted all chips and slot machines from US dollars to Vietnamese dong, a transition complicated by an exchange rate of roughly 27,000 to one. “The number of zeros adds additional challenges,” Power said. The mass floor and slots now run in dong, while VIP areas continue to operate in Hong Kong dollars and US dollars, and the cage still accepts USD cash — insulating the property from the dong’s depreciation against the greenback.
Together, the two developments point to a property whose addressable market is widening on multiple fronts at once — geographically through better connectivity, and demographically through expanded local access.
