Macau’s first-half tally of visitors from next-door Chinese mainland province Guangdong has greatly exceeded pre-pandemic level, but for feeder markets on the rest of the mainland, the recovery rate is only circa 71 percent.
That is according to GGRAsia’s review of public data, following the release on Thursday of visitor volume and segment information for the six months to June 30 this year by Macau’s Statistics and Census Service.
First-half visitor arrivals from Guangdong went up 30.4 percent year-on-year, to 7.92 million, which was 131.3 percent of the 6.03 million achieved in first-half 2019, the year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
But the cohort of first-half 2025 Macau arrivals from the rest of mainland China registered only 6.9-percent year-on-year growth, at 5.85 million, reaching just 70.6 percent of the equivalent half-year period in 2019.
Mainland source markets combined – i.e., 13.77 million arrivals – accounted for 71.6 percent of the 19.22-million total tourist arrivals to Macau in the six months to June 30.
The tally of mainlanders of all descriptions went up 19.3 percent year-on-year, being 96.2 percent of the equivalent period in 2019, when the city received 14.31 million mainland Chinese visitors.
Even among those visitors originating from Guangdong, there has been an outsize contribution from nine economically-developed mainland cities that form part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area.
Between them, the nine provided nearly 7.02 million of the 7.92-million visitors from Guangdong during the first half.
There was a circa 57-percent year-on-year rise in the tally from next-door Zhuhai city, to 2.48 million.
From January 1, the mainland authorities implemented exit-visa easing measures for certain Zhuhai residents wishing to visit Macau. Those eligible for the specific visa-easing measures accounted for 1.1 million of the arrivals supplied to Macau by Zhuhai in the first half.
The number of mainland Chinese that came to Macau from provinces and municipalities outside Guangdong was 5.85 million in the first six months of this year, up 6.9 percent year-on-year. The total was 70.6 percent of the equivalent period in 2019, when the city had received 8.29 million mainlanders from places outside Guangdong province.
Aside from Guangdong, the next-biggest mainland source markets in the first half were: Zhejiang province (458,894); Shanghai city (443,182); and Jiangsu province (406,191).
The first-half tally from Zhejiang was 4.5 percent higher than the same period in 2019, while that from Shanghai city was 8.5 percent up on 2019.
Macau’s top mainland feeder markets outside Guangdong during first-half 2019 had been: Hunan province (640,318), Hubei province (504,109) and the coastal Fujian province (481,955).
