Macau welcomed 174,234 visitors on Thursday, setting a new daily record for an October Golden Week, a peak holiday season for tourists from the Chinese mainland. The preliminary figure was released by Macau’s Public Security Police, the agency responsible for overseeing immigration checkpoints in the special administrative region.
The October Golden Week daily record was confirmed in data issued by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO). The prior record had been set only a day earlier when 166,061 visitors entered the city on Wednesday. A preliminary figure of 165,963 for that day – as disclosed by the police – had later been updated by MGTO.
Data from the Statistics and Census Service show that prior to this year’s holiday season, the top-three daily visitor tallies to Macau during an October Golden Week period all occurred during the 2019 festivities. October 5 that year saw around 162,100 arrivals. October 3, 2019 had reached approximately 161,600, and October 2 that that year had tallied about 159,300.
By the end of Thursday for the holiday season this year, Macau had logged an aggregate of 478,634 visitors over the first three days of October Golden Week, an average of approximately 159,545 visitors daily.
China’s State Council has designated this year’s holiday period on the mainland – encompassing National Day on October 1 – as running from October 1, a Tuesday, to October 7, a Monday, inclusive.
October Golden Week has traditionally been a period of high traffic for Macau’s casinos, driven significantly by mainland tourists. MGTO data indicate that around 87.0 percent of visitors during the initial two days of this year’s October Golden Week were from mainland China.
Last year’s October Golden Week, which coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival, drew nearly a million visitors to Macau over what was an eight-day holiday period. The city saw a peak of 158,726 daily arrivals on September 30, and averaged 116,546 visitors per day throughout the 2023 festivities.
During the recent summer holiday season, Macau received just over 3.65 million visitors in August, setting a “new monthly record”, said the city’s Statistics and Census Service in an update in late September.
