Macau saw 136,647 visitor arrivals for this year’s five-day Labour Day break, down 18.2 percent year-on-year on the same holiday period in 2021, according to data from the city’s Public Security Police, the body in charge of immigration checkpoints.
Hotel occupancy during the holiday period was 59.5 percent, said separately the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) in a Thursday press release. The rate was up by 28.8 percentage points compared to April. But the 2021 holiday period’s hotel occupancy rate had been 83.2 percent.
For this year’s break – which started on Saturday (April 30), and ran until Wednesday (May 4) for mainland China residents – the average daily tally was 27,329 visitor arrivals.
After surpassing the 40,000-arrivals mark on the first day, the diurnal tally declined to approximately 25,900 on May 1, then to 25,000 on May 2, and 24,212 on May 3, and to around 20,000 on May 4.
The Labour Day break in 2021 had been May 1 to May 5 that year. Macau’s total visitor numbers then, had been eventually calculated at 167,000, after an initial estimate of 165,500.
The 2021 average daily aggregate of visitors for that period had been 33,400, according to information at the time from MGTO.
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, mainland China has been the only place to have a largely quarantine-free travel arrangement with Macau.
Prior to this year’s Labour Day holiday period, a senior official at China’s National Health Commission had warned the country’s citizens against long-distance travel during the break, against the backdrop of the mainland facing ongoing risk of local Covid-19 outbreaks.
(Updated May 6, 9am)
