The Macau airport may see a “10 percent to 15 percent” increase in passenger volume for full-year 2024, compared to last year’s 5.15 million, said Eric Fong Hio Kin, marketing department director at its operator, the Macau International Airport Co Ltd (CAM), in comments to local media on Wednesday.
Mr Fong was speaking on the sidelines of an Air Macau ceremony marking the airline’s inaugural flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The Macau-Kuala Lumpur route is now run by two airlines: Air Macau and Air Asia.
Currently, the Macau air hub has flight links with several cities across mainland China and Taiwan; outside the Greater China region, the city has flight connections with major cities from Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia.
Mr Fong told reporters that the airport operator expected an increase in flight frequency or capacity during the upcoming Chinese New Year holiday in February, for destinations in “eastern China and Southeast Asia”.
The Macau airport handled 5.15 million passengers in 2023, representing a circa 54 percent recovery compared to 2019, when it handled a record-high passenger volume of 9.61 million, according to a January 4 press release from the airport operator.
The same release cited CAM as stating that in 2024, it would continue to work with airlines to “explore international markets”, and “to develop more direct or connecting long-haul routes”.
For the first 11 months of 2023, the Macau airport handled about 1.89 million inbound passengers, of which 74.8 percent – or about 1.42 million – were from mainland China, according to the latest available data published by Statistics and Census Service.
The 1.89 million visitor arrivals at the Macau airport represented 7.5 percent of the aggregate visitor arrivals to the city in the January to November period, at 25.27 million, according to official data.
