Macau received 790,016 visitors during the first five days of the ongoing mainland Chinese holiday season commonly known as ‘October Golden Week’.
The update was given by Macau’s Public Security Police, the agency responsible for monitoring the city’s immigration checkpoints.
October Golden Week is a major festive break for mainland China consumers and a peak trading period for Macau’s casinos. Mainland China is the main feeder market for Macau’s tourism sector.
China’s State Council has designated this year’s holiday period on the mainland as running from October 1 to 8, encompassing China’s National Day on October 1 and the lunar calendar-based Mid-Autumn Festival, which this year falls on October 6.
According to the preliminary data, the city welcomed a total of 191,176 visitors on Saturday (October 4). The figure declined to 113,051 on Sunday, as travel to and from Macau was impacted by Typhoon Matmo.
The city’s weather forecaster raised the Signal No.8 storm warning in the early hours of Sunday as Typhoon Matmo edged closer to Macau. They then downgraded it to storm Signal No.3 at 1pm the same day.
The city has five levels of tropical storm warning. They range from 1 (the lowest and least intense) through to 3, 8, 9 and 10 (the highest and most dangerous).
The passage of Typhoon Matmo caused a brief disruption to Macau’s transportation system and non-gaming services at casino resorts, but the gaming venues remained in operation.
In a press release issued shortly before Signal No.8 was hoisted, Macau’s gaming regulator stated: “To ensure the safety of casino workers and patrons, and to prevent potential risks arising from casino closures … gaming venues will remain open during the typhoon, and casinos have already prepared rest areas for casino workers and patrons.”
Nonetheless, shuttle services were suspended during the nearly 12 hours that the Signal No.8 was in force; so were the ferry services between Macau and Hong Kong. Ferry services between Macau and the mainland cities of Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Zhongshan had already been suspended in the evening of Saturday.
A number of flights scheduled for Saturday and Sunday was cancelled, according to an update from the operator of the Macau International Airport.
In their latest data, the police did not supply a breakdown on holiday-period visitors’ respective place of origin. However, the majority of tourists for the aggregate of the first five days entered Macau via the Border Gate checkpoint (364,054 arrivals), the Hengqin checkpoint (150,634 arrivals), or the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (124,920 arrivals).
Separate information provided by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) indicated that 583,641 of the visitors that entered the city in the first four days of the holiday break were from mainland China. Another 59,875 visitors in the four-day period came from Hong Kong, showed the MGTO data.
MGTO’s director, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said in recent commentary that Macau was likely to receive 1.2 million visitors during the eight-day holiday period, based on an estimate of 150,000 visitors per day.
