Macau’s tally of visitor arrivals grew 4.0 percent sequentially for the whole of October, despite the so-called ‘autumn golden week’ in the first seven days of the calendar period seeing a 32.8 percent increase in daily volume relative to the daily average in September.
According to data released on Monday by Macau’s Statistics and Census Service, the city recorded 580,333 tourist arrivals in October.
Earlier information from the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) flagged that the city had received an aggregate of more than 182,000 visits from October 1 to 7 inclusive. The full-month data issued on Monday, therefore indicates that circa 31.4 percent of the entire month’s arrivals were during autumn golden week (pictured), a public holiday period in mainland China encompassing National Day on October 1.
The numbers for the whole of October this year represented a “surge of 76.8 percent year-on-year, on account of a relatively low base of comparison in October last year which resulted from the pandemic,” said the statistics bureau. It was referring to choppy Macau tourism market performance linked to periodic Covid-19 countermeasures – including occasional travel restrictions – under China’s “dynamic zero Covid” policy.
The October 2022 number of visitors from mainland China expanded by 72.4 percent year-on-year to 518,843, with 202,166 visitors travelling under the mainland’s Individual Visit Scheme exit visa.
Visitors to Macau from the main nine cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area totalled 311,919, of whom 37.4 percent came from Zhuhai. There were 49,510 visitors from Hong Kong, and 7,614 from Taiwan.
The tally of overnight visitors in October was 313,542, while that for same-day visitors was 266,791. The numbers represented year-on-year gains of 181.4 percent and 23.0 percent respectively.
October’s average length of stay for visitors shortened by 0.5 of a day judged year-on-year, to 1.8 days.
