First-quarter visitor arrivals to Macau totalled circa 8.88 million, up 79.6 percent year-on-year, and 84.8 percent of the same quarter in 2019, indicated Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) in a Thursday release, citing provisional data from the city’s Public Security Police.
Mainland China – the most important feeder market for Macau’s gaming and tourism sector – accounted for 6.30 million arrivals or about 71 percent of the total, for the three months to March 31.
The daily average of 69,239 mainland Chinese visitors was nearly 95 percent more than a year ago, and almost 84 percent of the pre-pandemic first-quarter 2019.
Xi’an and Qingdao are two Chinese cities that from March 6 were added to the mainland’s exit visa system for independent travellers seeking trips to Macau and Hong Kong, known as the Individual Visit Scheme.
From January to March, Macau saw 47,000 visitor arrivals from Xi’an, and 24,000 from Qingdao, figures respectively 6.4 percent and 44.5 percent higher than the same period in 2019, MGTO noted in the release. Combined, the two places represented only 1.1 percent of the overall visitor arrivals from the mainland.
Hong Kong – ranked second after the mainland as a source market for Macau – supplied nearly 1.82 million visitors to the city in the first quarter. That was 101.4 percent of the same period in 2019, when Macau received 1.79 million visitors from Hong Kong.
The number of inbound travellers from international markets – outside Greater China – reached over 580,000 in the first quarter. That is equivalent to circa 6,400 international visitors a day, or nearly 68 percent of the same quarter in 2019, the Thursday release said.
The international travellers were drawn from some of China’s near-neighbours: the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. Also represented were India, as well as South Korea and Japan in the northeast portion of the region, MGTO said, citing Public Security Police figures. Numbers per market were not mentioned.
Macau’s tourism authority is “confident” that for full-year 2024, the city will attract more than 2 million international travellers, said MGTO director Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, in comments to local media at a Thursday event. There, she also forecast Macau would get 130,000 visitors daily during the upcoming May Day festivities, a public holiday period on the Chinese mainland.
