Gokongweis exploring other sites for NUSTAR

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May 26, 2025 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines — The Gokongwei Group is looking at replicating the success of its world-class NUSTAR Integrated Resort in Cebu City to other areas of the country in a bid to attract more tourists.

Tycoon Lance Gokongwei told The STAR that the group continues to explore other sites where it can potentially bring and introduce the NUSTAR brand.

“We’re just looking at various opportunities, but nothing concrete at this point,” he said in a recent interview.

At present, however, Gokongwei said the group’s main focus is making the NUSTAR Integrated Resort a more attractive site.

The Gokongweis’ Robinsons Land Corp. (RLC) opened earlier this month NUSTAR Hotel, the first ultra-luxury Filipino-branded hotel in the country, within the world-class integrated resort.

NUSTAR Hotel is the second major hospitality development of RLC within the NUSTAR Integrated Resort, following the successful debut of Fili, its Filipino five-star hotel brand, in 2022.

“Hopefully by next year, we’ll have the Grand Summit Hotel operate there. So our focus is to make the full NUSTAR complex a very attractive site,” Gokongwei said.

Grand Summit Cebu is expected to complete the P30-billion NUSTAR Resort complex.

The NUSTAR Integrated Resort, which officially opened in May 2022, marked the Gokongwei Group’s foray into the gaming and entertainment industry, with the aim of elevating and redefining luxury in gaming, entertainment, leisure, dining and retail in Cebu as well as in the entire southern Philippines.

It is the flagship project of Universal Hotels and Resorts Inc., a privately owned corporation of the Gokongwei Group focused primarily on gaming and integrated resort developments.

While the group remains bullish on a brick-and-mortar expansion of the integrated resort and casino, Gokongwei also acknowledged the growing presence of online in the gaming industry.

“But you can see the market’s moving to online. It makes that space more competitive,” he said.

As such, Gokongwei said the group has also started NUSTAR Online to cater to the growing segment.

NUSTAR Online is the digital extension of NUSTAR’s 21,000-square meter gaming floor, 1,000 slot machines and 150 table games.

The platform supports local payment methods like GCash and Maya.

“What I see is that the total revenue pull of offline or physical casinos is already flattening out. The entire market is growing. The online portion is growing. The offline portion is flattening out. And then the offline portion, while it is flattening out, it is also getting divided because of the increasing number of casinos,” Gokongwei said.

“So I guess what we need to do is to attract more tourists to the Philippines. And I guess make the whole complexes more exciting,” he said.