Grand wait turns costly

Which grand old dame of Manila’s hospitality scene — a storied address that once hosted presidents, beauty queens, and enough cigar-smoke deals — remains a ghost of charred concrete and deferred ambition, her resurrection, a property dealer intimated to Nosy Tarsee, now priced at more than twice what her insurers had bargained for.

The fire that gutted her in 2018 was bad enough. The pandemic that strangled the rebuild was worse.

A revised construction estimate showed that what once looked manageable at P1.5 billion, conveniently covered by insurance, has ballooned to a rather eye-watering P3.6 billion. Material costs have escalated and so has overhead.

The listed company behind this heritage pile had dutifully filed a soft-opening timeline for 2026 with both the stock market and the regulator, a phasing plan that looked reasonable on paper until reality intervened in its usual unglamorous fashion.

Tourism projections for 2027 remain clouded by a global slowdown and the gaming market, once the reliable golden goose of the hotel economy, is hitting a plateau, given that the inbound operators who used to ferry high-rollers to the capital are decidedly unmoved now that POGO is history and the action has migrated.

So the grand reopening will wait. Management, in the language of corporate disclosures, is “adopting a cautious stance.” Translation: nobody is writing a check of that magnitude until room rates, occupancy curves and gaming floors show numbers that can service debt without inducing cardiac arrest among the financiers. The earliest estimate of the rebuilding is next year, give or take the geopolitical weather.

Upkeep of the closed facility costs P764 million annually in maintenance, primarily to keep the superstructure from becoming a safety hazard or an eyesore.

Nosy Tarsee’s riddle: Who is this faded legend still waiting for her second act? She carries the name of a structure built for spectacle and she sits on one of Manila’s most historically saturated boulevards.