by Anni Lam

The general manger of the Grand Emperor Hotel, Jimmy Tang, yesterday told the Macau Daily Times at the sidelines of a charity function that the hotel casino did not and will not have plans to cut back their number of staff no matter if they were facing the global financial crisis or tightening individual travel visits.
However he also admitted that the occupation rate of the hotel rooms had seen a significant drop when compared with the same period last year.
After the execution of individual visitation restrictions, the overall business of the hotel had seen a drop by at least 10 percent, according to Tang.
“Since the number of rooms in the hotel are considerably small, with approximately 300 rooms in total, the negative impact for the running of the entire hotel was quite small.”
As a result, Tang continued that the promotional strategy for the hotel had long been to not reley on a particular market and that they had already built up multi-faceted market bases.
According to him, the visitors to their hotel were comprised of Japanese, Australians as well as Hong Kongers and mainlanders.
However, he still hoped that the central government could mitigate the restrictions on the issuance of individual visitations in order to help Macau overcome the global financial crisis.
And he lastly added that “actually in fact we still need to employ more staff to fill up the vacancies.”