The forty minutes
In November 2018 my cousin got married at a hotel on Cotai. I will not name it, because the point is not that this particular building is bad; the point is that it is normal. After the reception I went looking for the taxi rank and I could not find it. Not could-not-find-it in the sense of taking a wrong turn. In the sense of walking for forty minutes, passing the same gelato counter three separate times, and eventually asking a security guard who had to walk me there personally because the directions were too complicated to say out loud.
I had spent eleven years reading quantity surveys before that night. My whole job was looking at a number on a drawing and asking whether the number was true. So on the flight home I started writing down what I actually knew about that building, and the answer was almost nothing, because the only figures published about it were the ones that flattered it.
That is pyroluxa. It started in 2019 in my back bedroom in Nether Edge, Sheffield, and it has stayed roughly that size.
What we are
An independent gazette. We review the hotel and the architecture: the buildings, the rooms, the restaurants, the history, the walk between them. We are interested in Macau as a city built at a scale that does something to the people inside it.
We are not an operator, a casino, a bookmaker, an affiliate or a booking service. There is no company behind this, no group, no investor. Two people and a domain name.
What we refuse to do
- We do not take money from the venues. No payment, no comped stays, no affiliate links, no commission. I paid for every room I have slept in.
- We do not book anything. There is no reservation form here. The links go to the resort's own website and we earn nothing when you click them.
- We do not invent numbers. If an operator will not publish its casino floor area, the page says so and leaves the gap. Two of the five resorts on our front page have that gap. It is not laziness, it is the finding.
- We do not encourage anybody to gamble. We describe the gaming floor as a fact of the building, the way we describe the lifts. If you want strategy, odds or bonuses, this is the wrong paper and we do not carry them.
The staff
Ruth Camplin, editor
Sheffield. Eleven years in construction cost consultancy before this, mostly on schools and one very unhappy leisure centre. Writes the pages, does the walking, argues with press offices. Has been to Macau four times since 2018.
Femi Adeyanju, numbers
Leeds. Keeps the scale board, converts everything into square metres so the comparisons hold, and writes to operators asking for floor areas. He gets an answer roughly one time in five. The dashed lines on our chart are, in a real sense, his correspondence.
The honest bit
I have slept in three of the five hotels on our front page. Morpheus and Grand Lisboa I have only walked through, and both pages say so. I will not review a bed I have not been in, so if you want to know how those two sleep, you will have to read somebody else, and I would rather tell you that than pretend.
There is a second thing. This paper has a thesis, which is that these buildings are too big, and a thesis is a bias. I try to keep it in the open by publishing the criteria and the marks rather than burying them in adjectives. But you should read us knowing that we came to Macau already annoyed about the walking.
Corrections
If we have a fact wrong, tell us and we will change it and say that we changed it. This is not a courtesy, it is the entire product. The contact page is here, and we answer within five working days.
Last updated 17 July 2026