September visitor-arrival volume to Macau rose 68.3 percent month-on-month, to 557,842, according to data released on Friday by the city’s Statistics and Census Service.
The improvement was a ramping up from poor summer-month numbers that had coincided with a community outbreak of Covid-19 that began in mid-June.
September’s aggregate arrivals was nonetheless down 11.3 percent year-on-year. The tally of overnight visitors that month (280,270) and same-day visitors (277,572) decreased by 0.3 percent and 20.3 percent year-on-year respectively.
The average length of stay of visitors went up by 0.2 of a day year-on-year, to 1.8 days, with that of overnight visitors (3.5 days) and same-day visitors (0.2 day) increasing by 0.2 of a day and 0.1 of a day respectively.
The number of visitors from mainland China during September fell by 13.8 percent year-on-year to 502,668, with 188,148 of them travelling under the mainland’s Individual Visit Scheme. Visitors from nine cities within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area totalled 295,663. Of those, 39.6 percent came from Zhuhai in Guangdong province, next door to Macau.
September brought 46,179 visitor arrivals by people from Hong Kong, and 6,615 by people from Taiwan.
The September data meant that for the first nine months of the year, Macau had an aggregate of just above 4.36-million visitor arrivals, down by 24.2 percent year-on-year.
