Macau welcomed more than 768,100 visitors in the first six days of the October Golden Week holiday period, according to official data. The average number of visitor arrivals in the holiday period stood at about 128,000 a day, showed preliminary figures from the city’s Public Security Police.
Macau recorded the highest number of visitor arrivals on Saturday, the second day of the holiday period, at 158,726. On Wednesday (October 4), Macau recorded 113,677 arrivals, according to the figures released by the authorities.
China’s State Council has designated September 29 to October 6 inclusive this year as the holiday period popularly known as either autumn or October Golden Week. This year, the period encompasses the lunar-calendar based Mid-Autumn Festival, which fell on September 29, and China’s National Day on October 1.
The police did not supply a breakdown on visitors’ respective place of origin during the six-day period. But the majority of tourists entered Macau via border checkpoints solely serving people arriving from, or departing to, mainland China. Other checkpoints that typically have a wider mixture of travellers in terms of point of origin are at Macau’s airport, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, and the city’s two busiest maritime terminals.
But provisional figures from the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) – for the first five days of the holiday period – showed that the number of mainland China tourists stood at 493,857, accounting for 75.4 percent of all arrivals during the period.
In the first five days of the Golden Week, the number of arrivals from Hong Kong reached 123,507, making up for 18.9 percent of all arrivals in that period, according to MGTO.
A number of hotel properties at Macau casino resorts had already sold all or most of the rooms that were available on the open market, for most nights of the autumn Golden Week holiday period.
The robust advance bookings particularly for the five-star tier, could bode well for casino gross gaming revenue during the festivities, suggested several industry experts in comments to GGRAsia.
