The September tally of visitor arrivals in Macau rose sharply compared to August, said a recent announcement from the city’s Statistics and Census Service. Last month’s number was 449,085, up 97.7 percent on the prior month, showed the official data.
The statistics bureau attributed the increase to the resumption in late September of Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) visas for mainland Chinese to travel to Macau.
Applications for such exit visas had first restarted on August 26 but only for people from places in Guangdong. Applications for IVS permits by people from other parts of China only restarted on September 23.
Judged year-on-year, the tally of September arrivals was down 83.8 percent.
The tally of arrivals of visitors from mainland China in September stood at 412,451, down 78.6 percent judged year-on-year. Of those, 90,100 were using IVS visas, and 91.9 percent of them came from neighbouring Guangdong province, said the statistics bureau.
The September visitor data released on Friday showed the number of same-day and of overnight visitors was respectively 289,474 and 159,611. The average length of stay across both visitor categories was 1.0 of a day last month, a reduction of 0.3 of a day year-on-year.
The government said that was due to the component of same-day visitors – amounting to 64.5 percent of the total – having increased by 14.2 percentage points year-on-year.
In the first three quarters of 2020, the aggregate number of visitor arrivals declined by 86.7 percent year-on-year, to just below 4.02 million. Same-day visitors (2,219,383) and overnight visitors (1,799,721) declined by 86.1 percent and 87.4 percent respectively from the prior-year period.
