Dynasty not shutting down

Tinian Dynasty Hotel & Casino has decided to keep its hotel doors open after all.

Hong Kong Entertainment chair Wai Chan has assured Tinian Mayor Joey P. San Nicolas that Tinian Dynasty is here to stay and will continue to serve the people of Tinian and the CNMI.

“This news will encourage all the people of Tinian to remain optimistic and to look forward to a brighter future,” Chan said in his letter to San Nicolas dated Sept. 28.

Tinian Dynasty was expected to close before the end of this month after Chan wrote to San Nicolas last Sept. 1 of its imminent full closure, about two weeks after it shuttered its casino doors.

Hong Kong Entertainment owns Tinian Dynasty.

“I know in the last few months the situation here at the TDHC has been difficult at times and this has caused your [San Nicolas’] good office to suspend projects and lay off employees at your offices and other government agencies. …[We] will strive to ensure that the doors of the Tinian Dynasty remains open,” Chan said.

San Nicolas said that Tinian Dynasty’s decision to remain open is good news in the wake of public and private appeals by the mayor and the municipality to Tinian Dynasty officials to keep the hotel doors open.

As a result of the casino operations’ closure, San Nicolas recently laid off about 20 municipal employees whose positions were funded by casino revenues. Other businesses on Tinian also felt the impact, including Star Marianas Air, Inc., which recently announced it was laying off 17 employees and will be operating shorter hours.

Although it hasn’t been confirmed yet whether the casino will also reopen, the municipality hopes it will.

“This is great news for our community and I thank the Dynasty for their continued commitment to Tinian. Supporting the Dynasty is not just about supporting our casino industry. Tinian has very limited hotel rooms. We can’t promote any large tourism related activities such as the triathlon or the Pika Festival if we don’t have any rooms to accommodate our guests,” San Nicolas said. “This allows us to continue developing our tourism industry.”

He stressed that keeping the hotel doors open was equally essential to the CNMI’s tourism economy.

Marianas Visitors Authority managing director Perry Tenorio earlier said that Tinian has 365 room nights available each month.

“Based on our weighted averages of pax per room and length of stay, Tinian could support approximately six international narrow body flights a week with up to 200 seats per flight, assuming an industry average 85 percent load factor and 80 percent hotel occupancy,” Tenorio said.

“The MVA continues to promote Tinian with our industry partners in China, Taiwan, Korea, and all our source countries, both via tour packages as well as targeting free independent tourist travelers booking their own travel,” he added.

However, Tenorio stressed that Public Law 18-1 provides the funding for the MVA to do this, and PL 18-1 has also been providing funding passed directly through to the municipality to promote charter flights.

“If international visitors were able to fly direct to Tinian, I expect the economic landscape on Tinian would be significantly stronger,” he said.

When Chan announced Tinian Dynasty’s closure earlier this month, he said they didn’t have the “necessary capital resources of business revenue to sustain the hotel and were currently operating at a significant loss and couldn’t afford to do so any longer.”