Lawrence Ho: Praveen, maybe I’ll take the — my memory sucks, so I’ll take the last question, first. I think Thailand, we’ve been looking at it for many, many years. But after the Japan experience and — pretty unpleasant experience. I think we’re going to be very conservative, and we’ll see. Thailand, they’ve reestablished another gaming committee to look at it. We’ll continue to analyze it and see what we can do. But certainly, I think at this stage, we’re not going to be spending too much resources and definitely no money whatsoever on that. But if it does open up, the — other than Japan is probably the most exciting market out there. Because at the end of the day, for us, after the 3 years of COVID, our main focus is going to be on delevering and reducing that.
That’s our #1 objective. And #2 objective is returning money back to shareholders, whether it’s through dividend or buybacks. At these levels, it’s becoming very attractive, but we are very disciplined in the goal of reducing debt at this current stage. I think on the first and second question, maybe I’ll hand it off to David.
David Sisk : Great. So right now, Praveen, we’re looking to open up House of Dancing Water for the relaunch, probably late in fourth quarter of 2024. We’re just now going through the process of the remount. We’ve been doing a lot of work on the House of Dancing Water theater to get it up and ready. We just started doing our first shows there. We’re doing a production right now with [Jae Jung TV], where we’re doing some musical things in there right now on a weekly basis. And towards the middle of November, we’ll get back out of that and get started back on the remount for the House of Dancing Water. To kind of maybe go through your other question regarding room rates and room availability, I think a lot of the inventory is coming to the market whether that be with what we brought in with Epic, or what we brought in with W or now we’ve seen a new product coming in with the Galaxy guys with Andaz and with — again, the — escaping me right now, the name of the hotel.
But with the new product coming in as well as I think there’s an opportunity for these other hotels to kind of go through and to poach customers from some of the other hotels. So where you may be seeing some availability maybe in some of the older hotels, let’s say, the lack of 5 star hotels out there. So I think, again, we’ve not seen that problem. We’ve been able to backfill our hotels with the existing. And as I said, we’ve gotten to have 80% occupancy now with the W. We expect that to get into the low 90s as we get to the end of the year. We’ve had no trouble filling Epic, our hotels continue to be very strong, we continue to maintain very high occupancy percentages.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Antonio Luiz Gomes from Ninety One.
Antonio Luiz Gomes : I just wanted to understand on the GGR for Macau figure, it seems like from a quarter-on-quarter basis, it was pretty similar to the previous quarter. From my understanding, looking at your presentation, it seems like it came from City of Dreams VIP GGR. But I just kind of wanted to understand what the barriers are to the growth and what’s led to below average industry GGR levels relative to 2019 levels?
David Sisk : So I think from the barrier standpoint, as we’re going through here a little bit. I think — look, we’re kind in a strange world here a little bit, where because we’ve seen there’s fewer players now in the sense of — for the VIP business. So that’s created a lot more volatility. We have a tendency to have much larger players in our property. So that does create more volatility. So if we get one sided on that, that does have an impact on us sometimes from quarter-to-quarter, where years ago when we had the junkets, that would offset that and basically allow us to not see those impacts quite as much as we see a little bit more now. So I think that will continue for a long time here. I don’t think that’s going to change because I think the VIP market has fundamentally changed now without the junkets to smooth those things out.
But long term, I think you’ll see us get back to beyond where we were in 2019, at least from a premium direct standpoint from the VIP business.
Antonio Luiz Gomes : Okay. So going forward, the next couple of quarters you expect it to kind of normalize relative to industry averages, maybe beat that. Is that kind of the expectation?
David Sisk : The expectation is, it will return back to our historical averages, which again is at right around that 3% level. But again, the volatility will remain some time. So the next quarter could be a bit higher, it could be, again, a bit lower. But I think over the long-term view, we will get back to that 3%.
Antonio Luiz Gomes : Okay. And then everything else seems to be ticking along regardless in your — from your perspective?
David Sisk : Yes, I think everything is moving forward. Again, as we get — again, as the growth of the database, as we get more customers in, as Macau continues to recover and we get more airlift, and the transportation gets a little bit better. All these things will contribute to the market just getting stronger and stronger. But I think we’re well on our way, and it will just continue. We think there’s a lot more juice left in this thing to keep going well beyond where we are today and into the next year and beyond.
Operator: We have no more further questions at this time. I would like to hand the call back to Ms. Jeanny Kim for closing remarks.
Jeanny Kim : Thank you for participating in our call today. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Thank you.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.
