Some projects seem cursed from the start. The predecessor of the Manila Victoria Square Hotel—the Manila Pavilion Hotel—suffered a deadly fire on an ordinary night in March 2018, caused by aging wiring in the slot machine area. Six employees of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) failed to escape. The fire not only destroyed a building but also turned every critical milestone on the road to reconstruction into ashes over the next eight years. The pandemic and the POGO ban, two historic events that should have been unrelated to this hotel, struck precisely each time it tried to rise.
2018: A fire, 1.5 billion in compensation, and a blueprint for reconstruction from scratch
The conclusion of the fire investigation was straightforward—aging circuits in the slot machine area. The insurance company subsequently settled on a compensation amount of 1.5 billion pesos. With the price levels of that time, this amount was not ample, but it was at least enough to restore the main structure, and the project team accordingly set a clear timetable: trial operation in the first quarter of 2026, full opening in early 2027.
The Acesite Hotel Group, controlled by William Gatchalian, known as the "Plastic King of the Philippines," whose son is now known in the Senate for his anti-POGO stance, is held by Seaside Philippines Company with a 55.7% controlling stake. In the first two years after the fire, the reconstruction work progressed at a set pace—main body repair, structural reinforcement, facility upgrades, everything seemed on track. Until early 2020, an unrelated variable spread from Wuhan to the world.
2020-2022: The pandemic drags down the construction period, budget slides from controllable to out of control
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the hotel and gaming industry needs no elaboration. Repeated lockdowns in Manila, supply chain disruptions, construction workers unable to report to work—the reconstruction work went from "steady progress" to "intermittent." More fatal was the loss of the time window: the main construction originally planned to be completed in one to two years was forcibly extended to over four years.
Time is cost. The extended construction period meant that the prices of building materials experienced several rounds of surges over these four years, and labor costs also rose significantly. Worse still, after 2022, the ongoing Middle Eastern geopolitical conflict continued to drive up fuel prices, and logistics costs were comprehensively adjusted. By the time the project team sat down to recalculate, the reconstruction budget had directly doubled from the original 1.5 billion pesos to 3.6 billion pesos—a full 2.1 billion more than the original insurance payout. When insurance compensation could not cover the ledger, the project became a multiple-choice question: continue to invest money betting on the future, or stop and wait for the wind. The group chose the former, continuing to raise funds to push forward—after all, the pandemic would eventually pass, and tourists would return, which was the consensus at the time.
2024-2025: The POGO ban cuts off the last artery of customer source
The pandemic indeed passed. But the tourists did not return.
In November 2024, Little Marcos signed Executive Order No. 74, officially announcing the permanent shutdown of all Philippine POGO offshore gaming operations, with all associated fraudulent activities to be completely cleared by December 31, 2024. The direct impact of the POGO ban was the withdrawal of tens of thousands of Chinese practitioners from the Philippines; the indirect impact spread like dominoes throughout the entire Manila hotel and gaming ecosystem—once nourished by the POGO customer pool, the physical casino's customer flow experienced a structural collapse.
Even though the Philippines implemented a visa-free policy for Chinese tourists, domestic travel agencies no longer sent gamblers to Manila in large batches as before the ban. With the "customer pool" of POGO gone, coupled with the rapid popularization of online gaming platforms and the continuous diversion of offline customer flow, the customer structure of Manila's physical casinos has undergone an irreversible shift. Readers who follow the PASA official website may still remember, data from Philippine addiction institutions shows that participation in online gaming is still rapidly climbing—forming a cruel contrast to the increasingly empty lobbies of offline casino hotels.
The last straw that crushed decision-making was the management's judgment on the outlook: weak demand from foreign tourists in 2026, no end in sight to the US-Iran conflict in the short term, and the number of inbound tourists in 2027 also unlikely to see a significant rebound. The group still retains about 764 million pesos in reserved funds for possible future restarts, continuously allocating annual maintenance funds during the shutdown period to maintain the hotel's main body—the building cannot collapse, but they are also not planning to continue investing.
After three strikes: 2028 is a door that can be seen but not touched
The group estimates that the earliest possible resumption of work might not occur until 2028. Eight years—from the fire in 2018 to the most optimistic resumption window in 2028—ten years in total. A hotel casino, knocked down three times on the same construction site by an accidental fire, a global pandemic, and an administrative ban. These three events have no causal relationship, but each time they precisely hit the most critical node needed for reconstruction. Acesite's senior management used the phrase "cautiously optimistic" in the announcement, but for a project that has been bombarded by fire, pandemic, and bans, these words are no longer about strategy, but about surviving the ordeal.
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This article is from "PASA-Global iGaming Leaders," a gaming industry news channel: https://t.me/pasa_news
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