Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) director, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, has expressed “hope” the city could get 100,000 visitors daily during the upcoming Chinese festival Ching Ming – a holiday in mainland China, Macau’s biggest tourist market – as well as at Easter, which locally is a holiday season only in Hong Kong and Macau.
The target of 100,000 compared to current non-holiday daily numbers of 70,000 to 80,000, Ms Senna Fernandes remarked to local media at a Thursday event.
The mainland authorities have designated this year’s Ching Ming festival – a time for Chinese people all over the world to honour ancestors – as running from April 4 (a Thursday) to April 6 (a Saturday). In Hong Kong, Macau’s second-most important tourist source market, that particular holiday is confined to April 4.
For Hong Kong the Easter season – which like Ching Ming, observes a lunar-calendar timetable – runs this year from March 29 (Good Friday) to April 1 (Easter Monday) inclusive.
Macau’s tourism boss noted that across both festival periods: “We don’t expect that the visitor traffic will be as much as that for the Chinese New Year holiday.”
At the lunar new year break – from February 10 to February 17 inclusive on the mainland this time – Macau’s overall visitor arrivals reached almost 1.36 million, or close to an average of 170,000 a day.
Dragon Trail International, a marketing and research agency focusing on mainland consumers, said in a recent travel-sector review, that outbound trips – i.e., beyond the boundaries of the mainland – by that segment might only surpass pre-pandemic 2019 level by 2025. This year, such volume might reach “80 percent” of 2019’s.
During Chinese New Year this time, 3.60 million outbound trips were made by mainlanders, 57-percent of 2019’s 6.31 million outbound trips, noted the agency, citing figures from China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism.
The mainland’s five-day holiday surrounding Labour Day on May 1 would be an important time to observe in terms of trends, followed by the summer season as well as the Autumn Golden Week, encompassing China’s National Day on October 1, stated Dragon Trail International in its review.
