Macau recorded just over 3.22 million visitor arrivals in August, up 16.7 percent month-on-month, showed data published on Tuesday by the city’s Statistics and Census Bureau. It was the highest figure since August 2019, even before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, according to official figures.
The daily average of visitors topped 103,900, but the average length of stay of visitors dropped to 1.2 days, said the statistics bureau.
International visitor arrivals in August stood at 129,323, equivalent to 4.0 percent of aggregate arrivals in that month.
The number of visitors from the mainland was just above 2.32 million, accounting for 72.0 percent of August’s total arrivals. Visitors from Hong Kong and Taiwan reached 711,684 and 58,104, respectively.
The Macau government has a stated policy aim of encouraging its casino concessionaires to draw more of their customers from markets beyond China.
As part of the Macau government’s tender process for new 10-year gaming concessions, bidders were asked to create plans and pledge investment on a number of issues, including bringing in more customers from overseas.
Prior to Covid-19, Macau was overwhelmingly a Chinese tourism market, with mainland China and Hong Kong accounting for 89.6 percent of Macau’s 39.4-million visitor arrivals in 2019, according to Macau government data.
The director of MGTO, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, told GGRAsia in July that while the government did not have a long-term goal for the mix between international visitors and those coming from Greater China, an immediate target was to increase the market share of international arrivals to around 10 percent of the overall visitor volume.
In the first eight months of 2023, the number of visitor arrivals expanded by 363.1 percent year-on-year to nearly 17.63 million. Visitors from overseas markets totalled 733,588, accounting for 4.2 percent of all arrivals in the period.
