Visitor arrivals to Macau during the first seven days of the autumn Golden Week holiday period were down by 85.7 percent from the same period in 2019.
Preliminary figures from the city’s Public Security Police – compiled by the Macao Government Tourism Office – show that between October 1 and October 7 (Wednesday), Macau recorded 139,280 visitor arrivals.
The aggregate number of mainland visitor arrivals in the first seven days of this year’s autumn Golden Week stood at less than 130,000, a year-on-year decrease of 83.6 percent.
October Golden Week this year incorporates the lunar-calendar based Mid-autumn Festival, as well as China’s October 1 National Day. China’s State Council has designated October 1 to October 8, inclusive, as the holiday period.
According to the available data, Macau welcomed around 19,100 visitors on the seventh day of the holiday period, down 75.3 percent in year-on-year terms.
Last year, approximately 974,000 people visited Macau during the whole of autumn Golden Week, which ran from October 1 to 7. The tally – more than 81 percent of which involved visits by mainland Chinese – represented a year-on-year increase of 10.3 percent.
During last year’s autumn Golden Week, Macau recorded an average of about 139,200 visitor entries per day, according to official data.
The 2020 autumn Golden Week has been seen by a number of investment analysts as a key moment for gauging the likely strength of any comeback this year in casino gross gaming revenue for the Macau market, after the initial disruption wrought by Covid-19. Results so far – with just one more day to go – have been disappointing, according to a number of investment analysts and industry insiders.
