My consultant in Macau had some thoughts about Crown's (MPEL) City of Dreams property following his visit there yesterday.  CoD opens June 1st.  Here is his commentary:

My first stop was dinner at Lung Hin, the Chinese fine dining restaurant at CoD inside the Crown Tower with access from The Boulevard Mall on one side and the VIP Casino on the other.  Personally, I am not a fan of the design of most of the Crown facilities and was really disappointed by the appearance/design of some sections in this corner of the property.  On a more practical note: most of the staff uniforms have yet to arrive, as has all of the linen for the F&B portions of the property.  So the restaurant is operating without napkins... The staff was mostly local, very poorly trained with little to no English skills. A few of the senior managers are Malaysian and Vietnamese with experience and they were very good.

After dinner, we walked through the VIP casino into the Hard Rock Casino - a whole new world.  I would call this the first Las Vegas style casino in Macao.  The moment you walk in, you feel the vibe of party and good times.  However, it is also the smallest of the casinos in the property.  The main Crown casino floor however is huge, unappealing and doesn't display anything I recognized as special to set it apart from other casino floors in Macao.  The dealers and most of the pit managers are completely green.  We were invited to play with fake money in a trial run of the casino and it was a pretty sad experience.  Even with the pit boss standing behind the dealer, a lot of mistakes were made and blatant attempts at cheating were accepted.  I later ran into the VP running the casino and his only hope was that the staff was friendly.  All else, he acknowledged, is beyond expectation right now.

The Boulevard is very interestingly laid out around the exterior of the casino. Pretty much whenever you want to enter or leave the casino, you have to cross through some part of the mall which will likely make retail an interesting component of the experience at CoD.

I am promised that the Bubble Show is a total highlight but it was off limits to us last night.

The pool deck at Hard Rock is fantastic as is the Spa at Crown.