Macau’s recovery in January-to-July visitor volume from the Chinese mainland was led pace-wise by neighbouring Guangdong, with a full rebound relative to the same period in the pre-pandemic year of 2019, while the cohort of mainlanders from other parts of China showed a circa 67 percent comeback.
That is according to the data for the first seven months, after the July numbers were released on Tuesday by the city’s Statistics and Census Service.
In terms of all source markets in July – Hong Kong is the second-biggest component of Macau’s tourism sector – Macau received just above 3.02 million visitors, representing a 9.5-percent year-on-year increase, and a rise of 18.4 percent month-on-month.
The latest monthly tally took Macau’s aggregate visitor volume for the January to July period to 19.74 million, up by 37-percent year-on-year. This total also marked an 82.9-percent recovery of Macau’s inbound visitor volume in the same period in 2019, when the city saw 23.81 million visitor arrivals.
Around 70 percent of Macau’s visitor arrivals for the first seven months of this year – or 13.72 million – were from mainland China, according to the census service’s data.
Guangdong province – the most significant mainland feeder market, and next door to Macau – supplied nearly 7.19 million visitors during the first seven months of this year. This tally edged up by circa 0.5 percent from the equivalent period in 2019.
The mainland-visitor component from outside Guangdong totalled nearly 6.54 million in the January to July period this year; a 67-percent recovery from the same period in 2019, when Macau received 9.73 million mainland visitors from outside Guangdong province.
The Chinese provinces outside Guangdong that have been the most significant to Macau’s inbound visitor volume in the first seven months this year have been Shanghai city (542,986), Zhejiang province (491,737) and Jiangsu province (466,599). Around 66 percent of the visitors from these three places have visited Macau via China’s exit visa system for independent travellers known as the Individual Visit Scheme (IVS).
In March and then in May, a total of 10 Chinese cities distant to Macau were added to IVS, permitting independent travel either to that city or its neighbouring Chinese special adminstrative region, Hong Kong. But for Macau, few of those newly-added places are currently served by direct air links.
Those ten new IVS-status cities supplied in July 37,663 visitors to Macau, but only around half of those – or 18,837 – were actual IVS travellers, the census service noted in its latest update. The tally of these IVS travellers amounted to only 1.7 percent of the aggregate of 1.10 million IVS travellers from across the mainland in July, Macau statistics bureau data indicate.
Hong Kong supplied just over 589,000 visitors to Macau in July, a 10.9 percent decline year-on-year. In January to July, Macau received nearly 4.2 million visitors from Hong Kong, a tally that marked a circa 97-percent recovery to the equivalent period in 2019.
