Macau International Airport could see aggregate passenger volume for 2019 reach “over 9 million” arrivals and departures, said the president of the Civil Aviation Authority of Macao, Simon Chan Weng Hong, in comments to local media on the sidelines of an event on Friday.
In January the air hub’s operator, Macau International Airport Co Ltd (CAM), said it expected to handle 8.70 million passenger journeys this year.
The facility processed “more than 5.58 million” passengers in the first seven months of this year, representing a year-on-year growth of 17 percent, according to a CAM press statement issued last month.
The growth trend in the passenger traffic at the Macau airport was likely to be sustained for the rest of the year: it had not been adversely affected by the months of protest in Hong Kong, said Mr Chan in his comments to the media.
The local aviation authority has previously outlined a “master plan” that envisages annual passenger throughput at Macau’s airport rise to 15 million journeys, although a timetable for such capacity uptick has not been mentioned.
Most of the tourist arrivals to Macau in the first seven months of this year were via land crossings from mainland China. Of the 23.8 million visits the city registered for the January to July period, 17.6 million of them were via such routes. The tally of such land crossings represented 51 percent year-on-year growth, according to the city’s Statistics and Census Service. An aggregate of 2.23 million arrivals by air was recorded during that period, a year-on-year growth of 18 percent.
