Travellers, Suntrust set aside $450M to finish Westside City
Travellers International Hotel Group Inc. and its partner, Suntrust Resort Holdings Inc., will shell out up to $450 million to complete the long-delayed Westside City integrated resort project in Entertainment City, after taking over its development and operations.
Nilo Rodriguez, president and CEO of Travellers, told reporters on Wednesday the project was now 70-percent complete. Rodriguez said they were still targeting to open the main hotel casino by the third quarter of 2026.
The integrated tourism arm of conglomerate Alliance Global Group Inc. recently took over the $1.25-billion Westside City project after agreeing with Suntrust for a restructuring of operations.
Suntrust, owned by Hong Kong-based LET Group Holdings Inc., then took a backseat in the project. It took a 20-percent indirect stake in Entertainment City Resorts Corp. (ECRC).
Travellers now has an 80-percent ownership in ECRC, the entity that will develop Westside City.
“We talked to our partners to see how we can move this completion forward,” Rodriguez said. “The result of that is this [new] structure.”
Last June, Suntrust announced a delay in the completion of the main hotel casino from the original schedule of December 2025. It cited the need to review plans and “actual construction status.”
This was initially set to open in 2022, but parent firm LET Group faced heavy financial strain that slowed down the completion.
Once completed, Westside City will be the fourth casino hotel within Entertainment City. The others are Solaire Resort and Casino, City of Dreams Manila and Okada Manila.
It will feature over 2,500 hotel room keys across three brands, more than 2,000 gaming machines and tables, a “curated lineup” of restaurants and lifestyle brands and a theater district, said Rodriguez. He is concurrently the president and CEO of Newport World Resorts, the flagship casino project of developer Megaworld Corp.
Asked whether the patrons of Westside City and Newport would potentially intersect, the CEO clarified that Westside would cater to the upscale market.
“It will get you close to what you see in Macau … a little bit more flavor of stuff that are not in the market today,” he said.
In pursuing the development of Westside City despite the overall weakness of brick-and-mortar casinos in the country, Rodriguez said there was still an opportunity to bring back Chinese tourists in the country. This, especially since this was the gaming industry’s strongest market.
Data from the Department of Tourism (DOT) show that foreign tourist arrivals reached 2.54 million in January to May. This meant a decrease of 1.2 percent from the same period last year.
The number of tourists arriving from China slid by 32 percent to 114,496.
Still, Rodriguez said the China market may recover within the next three years should the government continue its push for lenient visa policies.
The DOT earlier said they were looking at bringing back the suspended e-visa program in China to stimulate demand from this market.
