Macau saw a daily average of just above 120,000 visitor arrivals during this year’s Labour Day holiday season, according to data from Macau’s Public Security Police. An aggregate of 604,395 visitors entered Macau between May 1 and May 5 inclusive, the labour-holidays break on the Chinese mainland, Macau’s main tourism feeder market.
The daily tally for the period was nearly 8 percent below the 130,000 daily visits forecast by the Macao Government Tourism Office several weeks before the holidays.
Friday saw the biggest single-day tally across the five days, at 154,006. The Saturday of the holiday coincided with thunderstorms and heavy rain in Macau and the neighbouring mainland province of Guangdong.
The police data do not include any breakdown of the source markets for the inbound visitors.
But they show that the city’s Border Gate – the inland boundary crossing between Macau and Zhuhai, the nearest mainland city, in Guangdong province – was the busiest. It handled 261,805 visitor arrivals in aggregate for those five days.
The second busiest boundary checkpoint was the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge crossing, which handled an aggregate of 106,499 visitor arrivals for the same period.
Nearly a week ahead of the Labour Day holiday season, some luxury hotels in Macau casino resorts were already indicating they had no rooms available for booking on the relevant nights, according to checks of the hotels’ own reservation sites by GGRAsia.
Large numbers of tourists were seen in downtown Macau and in the newer Cotai casino district, as well as in some of the city’s main casino floors, during a GGRAsia spot-check on May 2.
The most commonly seen minimum bets on baccarat tables were between HKD1,000 (US$128) and HKD1,500. A new ‘Small 6/Big 6’ baccarat side bet was also seen in use in the Macau market.
This year’s Labour Day holiday period in the Macau casino market was likely to produce daily gross gaming revenue (GGR) in the range of MOP800 million (US$99.1 million) to MOP850 million, said JP Morgan in a recent memo. “This would translate to circa 75 percent GGR recovery versus 2019 May Golden Week, in turn implying 110 percent to 120 percent recovery for mass GGR, that is stable from recent trends,” stated the investment bank.
