Macau’s visitor tally for this year’s eight-day October Golden Week was just above 1.14 million, according to data published by Macau’s Public Security Police.
The figure was up 15.3 percent from the festive period a year earlier. In 2024, the holiday ran for seven days, i.e., October 1 to 7, during which time Macau welcomed 993,117 visitors, according to official data.
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 had 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 fell on October 6.
The daily average for this year’s October holiday break was about 143,090, up nearly 1.0 percent from the comparable period a year ago.
The peak in the number of arrivals was logged on Saturday (October 4), at 191,176 visitors. The daily volume declined to 113,051 on Sunday, as travel to and from Macau was impacted by Typhoon Matmo.
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 seven days entered Macau via the Border Gate checkpoint (506,325 arrivals), the Hengqin checkpoint (209,575 arrivals), or the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (193,520 arrivals).
Separate information provided by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) indicated that 879,650 of the visitors that entered the city during the first seven days of the October Golden Week were from mainland China. Another 111,124 visitors in the October 1 to 7 period came from Hong Kong, showed the MGTO data.
MGTO’s director, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said in commentary prior to the holiday break that Macau was likely to receive 1.2 million visitors during the eight-day period, based on an estimate of 150,000 visitors per day.
Brokerage CLSA Ltd said at the start of the month that it expected Macau’s October casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) to grow by 9 percent year-on-year, to circa MOP22.6 billion (US$2.82 billion).
“We were in Macau on October 1, noting steady minimum bets and more family travellers compared with our prior visits,” wrote analysts Jeffrey Kiang and Leo Pan in a Friday memo. The note was published prior to the city being impacted by Typhoon Matmo.
Mass floors at the major Macau-peninsula casinos saw live-dealer baccarat table bets of HKD1,000 (US$128.50) among the most popular, while most-favoured wagers in the Cotai district ranged from HKD1,000 to HKD2,000, according to checks of casino floors on Monday by GGRAsia.
