Casinos
Cotai and the Cotai Strip®
There sure are a lot of casinos being built around Cotai. If you were to travel around Cotai right now, you would see a lot of construction cranes and half-finished hotels and buildings. But when the casinos on Las Vegas Sands’ Cotai Strip® and the rest of the surrounding Cotai area are all finally built, you’ll have a tough time trying to decide where to gamble since there will be so many of them.
The Grand Waldo hotel was the first of the Cotai casinos to launch the Cotai tourism boom. But in August of 2007, the Venetian Macao Hotel Resort on the Cotai Strip® was the first of the mega resorts in Cotai to open its doors to travelers from all over the world.
If you travel to the Cotai Strip® casinos or any of the other resort complexes being built in Cotai, you will find some big differences between the Cotai casinos and the Las Vegas and other western casinos. The most noticeable difference is the number of baccarat tables in Cotai. The Chinese and other Asian gamblers love their baccarat, much like the passion many U.S. gamblers have for blackjack and poker.
Taipa Island
Poor Taipa Island. How is Taipa supposed to compete with the billions of tourism dollars being used to build the Cotai casinos? To be honest, it can’t. But that shouldn’t stop you from including the Taipa casinos on your travel itinerary.
The Cotai casinos may get all the glitz and glamour, but the Taipa casinos should be enjoyed for what they are – smaller, more intimate settings where you can still try your luck at the baccarat tables. Think of Taipa as old school Macau, with one exception – The Crown Macau.
The new 6-star Crown Macau is located on Taipa Island but wouldn’t find itself out of place if it was located side-by-side with the casinos being built along the Cotai Strip® and the rest of Cotai, Macao.