Macau welcomed nearly 279,400 visitors over the weekend at the start of the Chinese New Year holiday season, showed preliminary figures from the city’s Public Security Police.
On Sunday (February 15), the first day of the holiday period on the Chinese mainland, Macau recorded 132,428 arrivals, according to the figures released by the authorities.
Chinese New Year this time falls on February 17 (Tuesday) and the annual celebration is usually a peak business period for the tourism and gaming industries in Macau. On the Chinese mainland – Macau’s main feeder market – the festival will be marked by a nine-day holiday that runs until Monday, February 23.
In the most recent set of data, the police did not supply a breakdown on visitors’ respective place of origin.
However, the majority of tourists for the aggregate of the first two days entered Macau either via the Border Gate checkpoint (111,494 arrivals), the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge (54,400), or the Hengqin checkpoint (50,687 arrivals).
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.
Banking group Citi observed earlier this month a pre-Chinese New Year slowdown in Macau’s casino gross gaming revenue. But the institution said it still expected January and February GGR combined to be 13.5 percent better than the same period last year.
Kenneth Feng Xiaofeng, chief executive of Macau operator MGM China Holdings Ltd, had suggested on an earnings call on February 5, that in the current market, even the run up to big holidays did not see a marked decline in tourism demand in the city.
