Macau visitor arrivals in May rose 21.6 percent year-on-year to just over 2.69 million, said the city’s Statistics and Census Service in a Friday announcement.
The tally was 79.3 percent of the figure in the same month of 2019, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Judged sequentially, the May number was up 3.5 percent on April’s just above 2.60 million.
May marked the labour-holidays season on the Chinese mainland, Macau’s main tourism feeder market.
The city saw an aggregate of 604,395 visitors between May 1 and May 5 inclusive, the period of the break.
Macau’s May casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) was nearly MOP20.19 billion (US$2.51 billion), up 8.9 percent on April.
It was the best monthly performance since January 2020, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the city’s GGR stood at MOP22.13 billion.
At the end of May this year, eight outer-mainland cities became active members of China’s exit visa system for independent travellers wishing to visit Macau and Hong Kong, the Individual Visit Scheme, known as IVS.
The statistics bureau said that during May the number of same-day visitors, i.e., just over 1.43 million, and overnight visitors, i.e., just above 1.26 million, grew year-on-year by 27.2 percent and 15.9 percent respectively.
The average length of stay of visitors held stable year-on-year at 1.2 days; the duration for same-day visitors remained unchanged at 0.2 of a day, while that for overnight visitors rose by 0.1 of a day, to 2.3 days.
The tally of May arrivals from mainland China increased by 25.9 percent year-on-year to nearly 1.86 million, with those travelling under the IVS – 893,373 – rising by 6.3 percent.
Visitors from Hong Kong tallied 582,083, a dip of 3.3 percent year-on-year, while the volume from Taiwan was modest at 68,971, but nonetheless up by 118.7 percent year-on-year.
The aggregate of international visitors jumped by 74.4 percent year-on-year, to 184,854 in May, equal to 61.3 percent of the same month in 2019.
Among Southeast Asian source markets, arrivals from Indonesia were 14,512, up by 15.6 percent from the same month of 2019.
Numbers from the Philippines (35,852) and Malaysia (15,094) returned to 73.8 percent and 80.2 percent of the respective figures in May 2019.
For India, the May arrivals tally was 13,759, or 65.7 percent of the May 2019 level.
