BAHA MAR
Baha Marketing D
elayed slightly from an autumn-2014 opening to a spring-2015 premiere, Baha Mar is a massive $3.5billion development comprising four hotels and a 100,000 square-foot casino in Nassau, New
Providence Island. The hotel brands are Baha Mar Casino Hotel, Grand Hyatt, Rosewood, and SLS LUX. It’s the kind of dream job marketing people might get to work on once in a lifetime – unless you are SK+G’s John Schadler. He explained to Casino International the company’s plan to revitalize the region’s past reputation as the Bahamian Riviera, while remaining very much a contemporary destination.
Casino International: What is Nassau like as a destination? John Schadler: Nassau has a storied past and a
reputation as a place for the jet-set crowd, in the 1950s and 60s in particular. The area where Baha Mar is now located was known as the Bahamian Riviera, Sinatra and the Rat Pack were frequent visitors. There was a genteel quality to the service, you dressed for dinner but during the day it had a Riviera mindset, very international. Today, Nassau and New Providence Island are
known mostly for Atlantis, the Sol Kerzner project on Paradise Island that is so well known worldwide. Baha Mar will be the more adult-oriented answer to Atlantis.
CI: Is it fair to say the customer base is going to
be predominantly American? JS: Probably 90% of visitor volume is coming from the US eastern seaboard. Canada is also an important part of the mix but I think you could safely assume that everything east of the Mississippi, particularly New York, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, even Dallas and Houston to an extent, those are the big visitor drivers. Toronto is a big market. That’s the existing visitor base and will continue to be where the substantial visitor volume continues to come from. That’s partly proximity, and partly because of air service. There is a desire and plan to grow the market beyond that very obvious one. Part of that is a function of a more international audience that’s free to travel.
28 OCTOBER 2014
CI: At what point in the development of Baha Mar did SK+G become involved? JS: Interestingly, we have been one of the original
groups on the project. It’s been almost a ten-year relationship. It began not long after we started the agency, we had been in business four or five years and got a call from the owner, Sarkis Izmirlian, who had seen some work we had done for Borgata in Atlantic City and he was a big fan of that brand. We had handled the launch work for them (and still work for them today); Sarkis asked me to come and see him in Nassau and divulged his plans for this full-scale destination resort. At that stage it was a joint venture partnership with Harrahs and Starwood, and was scaled in the same manner but with a group of Starwood branded properties. So it was very much the same model in that it was a strong group and convention based hotel in Westin, a very upscale luxury brand in St Regis and a lifestyle brand for a younger, hipper audience with W. The latest iteration may have different parent companies, but Hyatt, Rosewood, SLS and Baha Mar has opted to operate the casino hotel on their own. So that project was full speed ahead, and then ran into the great recession. A lot of people in the hotel and development business ran for the sidelines and that’s what happened here so the project was put on hold with no-one knowing if it would ever see the light of day. We had done a huge amount of work up to that point in the brand’s development, and were then told it was not going to happen. Then there was an influx
Las Vegas-based marketing experts SK+G have the contract to develop Bahamas super-resort Baha Mar’s brand identity. John Schadler, Managing Partner, SK+G talked to Casino International about this enormous project
The UK has a regularly scheduled service to Nassau and that audience loves the Bahamas and while it may only be a point or two of visitor volume, it’s still important. There is a desire based on the ownership interest
and relationship that Baha Mar has formed with the Chinese government to drive more visitation from mainland China. That may not be a substantial percentage volume but hopefully it will be a significant contributor to average daily spend. The Chinese government and the Export-Import Bank of China is the main lender to the project and the China State Construction Company is actually building Baha Mar, so there is a lot of crossover there.
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