Visitor arrivals to Macau during the first two days of the autumn Golden Week period were up by 8.8 percent from the same period in 2018.
October’s Golden Week period includes China’s National Day on October 1, which this year fell on Tuesday. China’s State Council declared the 2019 holiday period as running for seven days, i.e., October 1 to 7.
Preliminary figures from Macau’s Public Security Police – compiled by the Macao Government Tourism Office – showed that on Wednesday the city welcomed almost 161,200 visitors. That was a 13.4-percent increase year-on-year compared to the equivalent period in autumn Golden Week 2018. About 140,900 of Wednesday’s visitors came from mainland China, a rise of 13.7 percent in that market segment judged in year-on-year terms.
In the first two days of autumn Golden Week, Macau recorded approximately 297,000 visitor arrivals, up by 8.8 percent year-on-year. The aggregate number of mainland visitors in those first two days stood at approximately 257,600, up by 9.6 percent.
Autumn Golden Week is usually a peak season for Macau’s tourism and gaming industries as hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese tourists take advantage of the weeklong break to visit Macau. There is however no clearly demonstrated connection between overall tourism arrivals and casino gross gaming revenue in Macau.
A senior official of the Macao Government Tourism Office was quoted last week as saying the city anticipated a possible 15 percent year-on-year rise in visitor numbers during Golden Week.
Last year, approximately 890,000 people visited Macau during autumn Golden Week, which ran from October 1 to 7 in 2018. The tally – more than 80 percent of which involved visits by mainland Chinese – represented a year-on-year increase by 7.2 percent.
