Macau’s May visitor tally up 26pct year-on-year
Visitor arrivals to Macau totalled nearly 3.4 million in May 2019, up by 25.6 percent year-on-year. The pace of growth in same-day visitors to Macau that month was faster than that for overnight visitors, according to the latest data released by the city’s Statistics and Census Service.
The tally of overnight visitors in May was 1.6 million in May, representing an increase of 10.3-percent year-on-year. The aggregate of same-day visitors in that month was nearly 1.8 million, a 43.3-percent jump.
The month included the Labour Day holiday period – one of the major festive seasons for residents of mainland China. It ran from May 1 to May 4 this year. During those four days, Macau welcomed 636,644 visitors, the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) had said in a statement published last month. The tourism office said a surge associated with a Chinese holiday period and the volume of people arriving via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge had led to a “considerable” year-on-year increase in inbound visitor traffic.
In May, the volume of Macau’s inbound visitors arriving via land crossings – including the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge – grew by 64.2 percent year-on-year to over 2.5 million, far outpacing the growth in numbers regarding those that arrived in the city by air or by sea. The tally of visitors coming to Macau via ferries in that month declined by nearly 40 percent to 546,919, the official data show.
The Border Gate checkpoint from neighbouring Zhuhai in Guangdong province remained in May the predominant point of entry to Macau, according to the statistics bureau, accounting for 1.77 million visits – up 32.2 percent year-on-year – and 517,060 arriving via the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. The latter only opened in October, so no year-on-year comparison was possible.
The statistics bureau’s tourist arrival data for May indicated the average length of stay of visitors to Macau slightly shortened judged year on year: by 0.1 day to 1.2 days. The duration of visit for overnighters and same-day visitors was 2.3 days and 0.2 day respectively.
The May aggregate of visitors from mainland China increased by 30.4 percent year-on-year to nearly 2.43 million, with those travelling under the Individual Visit Scheme, China’s exit permit system for its most economically developed cities – totalling nearly 1.11 million – a year-on-year increase of 29.9 percent.
Visitors hailing from the mainland came primarily from Guangdong (nearly 1.06 million) and Hunan province (approximately 119,401).
The May tally of tourists from South Korea (65,763), Hong Kong (581,780) and Taiwan (87,837) went up by 1.2 percent, 20.1 percent and 4.4 percent respectively year-on-year.
The Macau government also offered information on the sum of visitors to Macau from the communities that form China’s city-cluster project known as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. Those places are: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing – all in Guangdong province – and the two Special Administrative Regions of China; namely Hong Kong and Macau.
The statistics bureau said that in May, the tally of arrivals from the nine mainland Chinese cities in the Greater Bay Area grew by 45.8 percent year-on-year to 924,272.
The addition of the May data meant that as of May 31 Macau’s visitor 2019 arrivals tallied nearly 17.19 million, up by 21 percent year-on-year.
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