Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, director of Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO), has told local media that some of the city’s hotels have seen improving occupancy trends during December.
“Currently, many tourists here are staying in Macau overnight… in some hotels the occupancy rate is even up to around 80 percent,” said the MGTO director in comments on Saturday on the sidelines of an event. She did not name the hotels concerned, but noted that the city’s hotel room nightly rates had in recent times become more affordable for visitors.
The Macau government would continue next year spending-stimulus initiatives for consumers, including discount offers aimed at tourists, for hotel stays and flights via some e-commerce platforms, said the MGTO boss. An aim was to ensure volume of visitors during the upcoming Lunar New Year break in early February, the tourism official explained.
In other developments, government data issued on Wednesday (December 23) showed the pace of month-on-month growth in Macau’s visitor arrivals moderated in November.
The city saw 636,351 visitor arrivals during that month. That tally marked 9.3-percent growth compared to October, but also represented a 78.1-percent year-on-year decline, according to the Statistics and Census Service.
In November, the tally of overnight visitors and same-day visitors was 323,794 and 312,557 respectively.
During that month, the average length of stay of overnight visitors, i.e., 3.1 days, represented an increase of 0.7 of a day year-on-year. For same-day visitors the duration of stay, i.e., 0.1 of a day, declined by 0.1 of a day.
In terms of source of visitors, the tally of arrivals from the Chinese mainland in November fell by 71.0 percent year-on-year to 588,511.
Those travelling under the Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) exit visa system run by the mainland authorities, accounted for 197,311 arrivals.
Visitors journeying via any of the nine Pearl River Delta cities designated as part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, accounted for 327,413 of the arrivals. Of that cohort, 159,079 arrivals, or 48.6 percent of the total, came from Zhuhai.
Additionally, Macau had 43,178 visitors holding Hong Kong ID, and 4,589 arrivals from Taiwan.
In the first eleven months of 2020, the number of visitor arrivals to Macau declined by 85.6 percent year-on-year to 5,237,441.
The aggregate of same-day visitors in that calendar period, i.e., 2,805,704 and of overnight visitors, namely 2,431,737, declined by 85.4 percent and 85.8 percent year-on-year respectively.
