Shanghai was ranked two for the second consecutive year in Macau’s table of mainland-China visitors using any form of China exit visa, having been only in seventh spot in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.
For 2024, Guangdong province – next door to Macau and the perennial key mainland market – followed by Shanghai city and Zhejiang province, were in descending order the top three mainland source markets, shows GGRAsia’s review of figures from Macau’s Statistics and Census Service. The three registered double-digit year-on-year growth in percentage terms.
Overall 2024 visitor arrivals to Macau – according to official data released last week – were just under 34.93 million, of which 70.1 percent – or 24.49 million entries – involved travellers from the Chinese mainland. Year-on-year, the entire mainland visitor segment grew by 28.6 percent. The recovery rate for the segment – relative to numbers seen in 2019 – was 87.7 percent.
In terms of the breakdown of 2024 mainlander numbers, Guangdong supplied 13.11 million, up 27.5 percent year-on-year. That next-door province’s tally was actually higher than in 2019, up 2.26 percent.
For 2024, second-place Shanghai provided just over 872,000 visitors, up 11.2 percent year-on-year, and a gain of 20.8 percent relative to 2019.
Third-palace Zhejiang province, supplied Macau with 840,646 visitors in 2024, up 25.0-percent year-on-year, and up 6.6 percent compared to 2019.
Many visitors from either Guangdong or Shanghai used China’s Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) exit visa system to come to Macau, the statistics indicated.
In 2024, 8.56 million visitors from Guangdong used IVS visas, i.e., 65.3 percent of Macau’s visitors from that province. The Guangdong IVS visitor tally grew 14.8 percent year-on-year, and had recovered to 91.4 percent of 2019-level, when Macau received 9.37 million IVS visitors from there.
For 2024, in total there were 785,819 IVS visitors from Shanghai, up 6.26 percent from 2023, and up 18.8 percent from 2019. In the latter year, Shanghai had already been amongst the most significant source markets for Macau’s IVS visitors.
Last year, Beijing was in third place as a source market for IVS travellers. It accounted for 419,739 such arrivals, up 22.5 percent year-on-year.
In 2024, 10 cities on the Chinese mainland were added to the IVS system, two in February and another eight in May. The latest statistics data had no information on the aggregate volume of IVS travellers that came from those 10 mainland cities.
