NUSTAR Resort & Casino

NUSTAR Resort & Casino sits on Cebu City’s South Road Properties, the reclaimed waterfront strip the city has been filling and building out since the 1990s. It opened in 2022 as the first integrated casino resort in the Visayas, and the design leans into that reclaimed-land setting — a low, horizontal profile facing the Mactan Channel rather than the tower-block model Manila’s casino belt is built on.

• The gaming floor and retail promenade sit at the resort’s public-facing edge, drawing a mixed crowd of staying guests and visitors coming in for dinner or shopping rather than to play.
• Restaurant options range from the resort’s signature dining rooms to more casual outlets, most with a channel-facing line of sight toward Mactan.
• The pool deck and spa occupy the quieter upper levels, set back from the retail traffic below.

NUSTAR anchors a wider push to build out Cebu City’s MICE and leisure economy on land that didn’t exist a generation ago — the same reclamation project that carries its public boardwalk along the waterfront below. The resort opened on May 8, 2022, a joint undertaking between the Cebu City government and Universal Hotels and Resorts, Inc., with Robinsons Land Corporation involved in operations and later expansion — a mix of public land partnership and private hospitality management that’s fairly typical of how the Philippines’ newer integrated resorts get built. The complex holds three hotel towers with more than a thousand rooms combined, and a gaming floor spanning roughly 21,000 square metres with around 250 table games and 1,500 electronic gaming machines — scale that puts it closer to Manila’s established casino resorts than to anything that previously existed in the Visayas.

That scale carries real economic weight for the city beyond the gaming revenue itself. An integrated resort of this size runs on a large hospitality, food-service, retail and facilities workforce, much of it drawn from Cebu City and the wider metro rather than relocated from Manila, and the MICE facilities give the city a large-scale convention and events venue it previously lacked — useful for a metro whose economy already leans heavily on BPO business travel and needs somewhere to host it.

Casino resorts of this size also carry a governance dimension worth naming: PAGCOR licensing in the Philippines comes with responsible-gaming requirements, and a resort this large has an operational interest in visible self-exclusion programs and problem-gambling referral pathways alongside the entertainment offering, whatever the actual uptake looks like day to day. On the physical side, a resort this large sitting on reclaimed land carries a heavier water, power and waste footprint than a standalone hotel would, simply from the combined load of three towers, a large gaming floor, and continuous retail and dining operations running on a site that was open water a generation ago. Visitors coming purely for the retail promenade or a dinner reservation should confirm dress code and minimum-age rules before arrival — casino floor access and the surrounding public areas run under different entry conditions.

Explore More in Cebu City

• National Shrine of Our Lady of the Rule
• Dona Marilyn Wreck
• Lantaw Native Floating Restaurant