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Chile’s Superintendencia de Casinos de Juego (SCJ) closed out its latest licensing round this month with a lopsided scorecard: of five casino concessions up for renewal – Pucón, Coquimbo, Iquique, Viña del Mar and Puerto Varas – only two attracted qualifying bids, and even those cleared the bar narrowly. Iquique and Viña del Mar drew no offers at all, while Puerto Varas drew two bidders who were both disqualified on technical grounds, leaving Pucón and Coquimbo as the round’s sole active contests.
Pucón: a bid built on continuity
In La Araucanía, Casino Volcán Pucón S.A. stepped forward as the sole bidder for the Pucón concession, led by a team with deep roots in the incumbent operator. Andrés Raggio, formerly Enjoy’s treasury manager, holds the controlling stake, while Gonzalo Grob – a commercial engineer who spent years across Enjoy’s operations, including as general manager of Enjoy Pucón from 2018 to April 2025 – will run the business as general manager. The bidding group also includes several other Enjoy veterans: former operations director Pier Paolo Zacarelli, former corporate projects manager Oscar Mayorga, and former legal manager Daniela Bawlitza.
The proposal, according to people familiar with its development, is built explicitly around continuity rather than reinvention: full retention of the casino’s existing workforce as required under the tender’s terms, operation from the same Miguel Ansorena address the casino already occupies (a property the group has purchased with bank financing), and a renovated events venue designed to host conventions and performances during the destination’s slower seasons. The framing, as those close to the bid put it, is that Pucón’s tourism appeal doesn’t need reinventing – it’s already established and running year-round – so the goal is strengthening what’s there rather than disrupting it. It’s a notable contrast to the uncertainty playing out elsewhere in the same licensing round.
Puerto Varas: two bidders, two disqualifications, one deserted process
Puerto Varas drew genuine competitive interest – Corporación Meier, the Peruvian group currently operating casinos in Talca and Puerto Natales, and Dreams, the operator tied to businessman Claudio Fischer and Puerto Varas’s current incumbent – but the SCJ disqualified both on documentation grounds and declared the process deserted, meaning it must now restart with newly defined technical conditions.
The SCJ’s stated reasoning was specific to each bidder. Corporación Meier, bidding through Sociedad Quiquilhue S.A., was disqualified for submitting incomplete information, missing filing deadlines, and – notably – having shareholders linked to companies with unpaid tax debts tied to other casino concessions it operates (in Maule, Antofagasta and Patagonia). It’s not the company’s first disqualification on similar grounds: the same thing happened in tenders for Coyhaique and Ancud earlier this year. Dreams, bidding through Inversiones y Turismo Puerto Varas S.A., was found to be missing a complete corporate filing, hadn’t registered with the CMF’s Registro Especial de Entidades Informantes, and had outstanding tax debts tied to related companies, among sixteen missing tax-compliance certificates.
Both companies pushed back hard. Dreams argued its economic bid envelope was never even opened, and characterised the issues as formalities – timing of third-party-issued documents, not substantive tax problems – that in past tenders would typically have been clarified through standard consultation mechanisms rather than triggering disqualification outright. The company pointed to a broader pattern: of seven licensing processes resolved in 2026, five have ended without an awarded operator, which it argues points to a structural problem with how these tenders are designed and run, not isolated technical slip-ups. Corporación Meier struck a similar note, framing the shifting evaluation criteria as a source of genuine uncertainty for a foreign investor weighing further commitments in Chile, alongside other recent sector headwinds including collusion investigations.
Reading the round as a whole
Taken together, the results underscore a tension worth watching alongside Chile’s parallel push to modernise the framework governing both land-based casinos and the online betting operators now organising around pending legislation: even as industry associations lobby for regulatory clarity on the online side, the licensing process for the sector’s existing physical assets is generating exactly the kind of unpredictability operators say undermines long-term investment. Pucón’s continuity-focused bid stands out as a genuine bright spot in an otherwise thin round – proof that well-structured, locally-grounded proposals can still move forward smoothly even as other tenders stall on process disputes the SCJ will now have to resolve before restarting Puerto Varas, Iquique and Viña del Mar from scratch.
