Macau welcomed more than 898,665 visitors in the first five days of the Chinese New Year (CNY) holiday period, according to official data. The average number of visitor arrivals so far in the holiday period stood at about 179,733 a day, showed preliminary figures from the city’s Public Security Police.
On Wednesday, Macau recorded 195,567 arrivals, according to the figures released by the authorities.
The Chinese New Year holiday period runs from February 10 to February 17, inclusive. The holiday period is usually a peak season for Macau’s gaming industry as hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese tourists take advantage of the break to visit the city.
The police did not supply a breakdown on visitors’ respective place of origin during the five-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 four days of the holiday period – showed that the number of mainland China tourists stood at 524,627, accounting for 74.6 percent of all arrivals during the period. The daily average of such visitors stood at 131,156, up 247.9 percent from the comparable period in 2023.
In the first four days of the holiday break, the number of arrivals from Hong Kong reached 135,925, making up for 19.3 percent of all arrivals in that period, according to MGTO. The daily average reached 33,981, a 44.4-percent increase from the prior-year period.
Macau recorded the highest number of visitor arrivals on Monday, the third day of the holiday period, at 217,541. It marked not only the highest daily number of arrivals since the relaxation – in January 2023 – of travel restrictions associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, but also represented the second highest daily number on record.
The peak had been reached during the Chinese New Year period in February 2019, when Macau logged 226,326 arrivals on the third day of the holiday break. In 2019, the last trading year before the onset of the Covid pandemic, visitor arrivals to Macau during the seven days of the Chinese New Year period passed the one-million mark for the first time.
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 this month’s holiday period, according to a survey by GGRAsia.
JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd said in a note before the holiday period that its own checks on Chinese New Year indicated “a very healthy level (essentially a record-high quality) of gaming patrons pre-booked for comped rooms”.
The brokerage said it expected “over MOP650 million [US$80.7 million] a day print over the eight-day holiday – implying about 120 percent recovery in mass gross gaming revenue versus 2019 Chinese New Year – including a lull period (first few days of very weak days)”.
