businesstraveller.com JULY/AUGUST 2019
DESTINATIONS
Casinos remain prohibited in the mainland, though of
course should mum and dad fancy a flutter, Macau is
just a short drive away and immigration is open 24/7exploration and adventures using state-of-the-art
technolog y”. Visitors will be able to stay at the 494-
room Hengqin Hyatt Regency Hotel, and there’s also an
event venue called Hall of Inspiration that can hold up
to 1,500 people.
With Chimelong Ocean Kingdom just down the
road, some may feel the theme-park market here
will become too saturated, but the government and
developers are betting that the parks will complement
rather than cannibalise each other. “They try to have a
cluster of theme parks over there, including what they
have in Hong Kong [Disneyland and Ocean Park].
As you can see from Orlando, the theme parks do not
necessarily cannibalise each other, they subsidise and
support each other,” says Dr Schuckert.
“If you have more theme parks people stay longer.
People swap from theme park to theme park and
increase travelling there because there are a lot of new
attractions. The advantage of Zhuhai is that shopping,
gaming and entertainment are very close to eachother. It’s all within one hour’s drive: you can go from
‘Orlando’ [Zhuhai] to ‘Las Vegas’ [Macau], and for
shopping Hong Kong is like New York or San Francisco.
Basically, in one hour you can jump between one, two,
three cities.”
All this development in Zhuhai is indeed very
promising, but it needs to be put into perspective.
China is a country of nearly 1.4 billion people, with
a wide range of economically important cities. In the
Greater Bay Area alone, Zhuhai is already dwarfed by
economic powerhouses like Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Still, Zhuhai’s unique charm as a coastal, green city
could be its standout characteristic.
“Zhuhai is quite small. It cannot compete with
Shenzhen or Guangzhou,” says Huang from the Zhuhai
International Convention & Exhibition Center. “It’s
still a small city, but our feature is we have wonderful
beaches, we can see the ocean and we can go to
Hong Kong and Macau very conveniently, so this is
our advantage.”BT33