GGRAsia – Macau hotel occupancy might reach 80pct July, Aug: MGTO

Macau hotel occupancy might reach 80pct July, Aug: MGTO

Jul 05, 2021 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

Macau’s average nightly hotel-occupancy rate might “gradually” rebound to as much as “80 percent” during the summer-holiday months of July and August, said Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes (pictured in file photo), in comments to local media on Saturday, on the sidelines of an event.

“For June, we saw that the [average] hotel occupancy rate dropped to…below 50 percent,” said the MGTO boss, “This happened because fewer tourists came here.”

“We hope that in July and August,” the occupancy outlook “will gradually rebound,” said Ms Senna Fernandes, mentioning a range of “70 percent to 80 percent” for the seasonal-holiday months, that coincide with school holidays in China and the traditional time for family trips.

Mainland China is the only place to have a largely quarantine-free travel bubble with Macau, amid existing travel restrictions as countermeasures against Covid-19. Of mainland places, Guangdong province has been the single-largest feeder market for Macau’s visitor arrivals.

But fresh cases of Covid-19 infection in Guangdong province have been reported since late May. That has had a negative effect on Macau’s visitor arrivals for June, the MGTO boss mentioned to local press previously.

To help support demand for hotel services in the local tourism market, the Macau government has a subsidy scheme for Macau ID holders toward the cost of so-called “staycation” holidays. It is part of the city’s “Stay, Dine and See Macao” stimulus initiative. The subsidy for a local hotel stay is likely to help occupancy figures for July and August, said the MGTO boss.

The average room occupancy level across the city’s three-, four-, and five-star hotels was 68.2 percent in May, according to the latest available survey results by the Macau Hotel Association. In that month, the occupancy rate of five-star hotels in the city was 67.1 percent, with the average room rate MOP1,107.90 (US$138), the trade body’s data show.

The association has 35 hotel-venue members across the three-star tier to five-star tier, including several major casino resorts run by Macau’s six gaming concessionaires.