Chile casino licence tender draws no bidders in Iquique and Viña del Mar, prompting new rounds

Chile’s casino operating-rights tender produced mixed results across four municipalities: bids came in for Coquimbo and Pucón, but Iquique and Viña del Mar drew none. For PSPs and acquirers watching the sector, the useful bit is simple: tender design is once again under scrutiny, and the regulator now has to restart two processes from scratch.

1. The Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ) said it received offers for Coquimbo and Pucón, with one project submitted for each location: Casino de Juegos de Coquimbo S.A. and Casino Volcán Pucón S.A. In Iquique and Viña del Mar, there were no applicants at all.
2. Because of that, the SCJ must open new tender processes for both municipalities and set the special conditions again in the respective technical rules. The agency will now move to the technical evaluation stage for the submitted bids, with a maximum review period of 120 days.
3. Marina del Sol said the low participation confirms its earlier warnings about the structure of the process. The company argued that the weak turnout across Pucón, Coquimbo, Viña del Mar and Iquique shows a lack of effective competition and points to structural problems in the licensing model used since 2015.
4. Dreams also challenged the tender terms, calling the technical conditions “excessively burdensome” and unjustified. In its view, the requirements discouraged operators from bidding, especially in Iquique, where the rules said that improvements made by the operator would pass to the municipality at the end of the permit without any compensation. Dreams said that turns the investment into a sunk cost that cannot be recovered when the concession ends.
5. In Viña del Mar, Dreams highlighted the combined weight of the financial and investment requirements: an annual economic offer of 394.000 UF, plus an obligation to improve Avenida Perú with an investment of up to 120.000 UF, plus a requirement to retain 100% of the workforce. On paper that is a tender; in practice, it is a fairly expensive way to ask why nobody showed up.

For high-risk payments players, the point is not just whether these casino licences get awarded. It is that Chile is again testing how much economic and operational burden a concession framework can carry before operators decide the math no longer works.