Macau might see a summer spike for Individual Visit Scheme (IVS) tourists from the Chinese mainland due to factors including freshly-eligible places being added to the central government scheme, says Macau Travel Industry Council president Andy Wu Keng Kuong.
His remarks were to local Chinese-language news outlet, Macao Daily News.
From Monday (May 27), eight outer-mainland cities became active members of the IVS scheme: Taiyuan in Shanxi Province; Hohhot in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region; Harbin in Heilongjiang Province; Lhasa in Tibet Autonomous Region; Lanzhou in Gansu Province; Xining in Qinghai Province; Yinchuan in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region; and Urumqi in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Nonetheless these places in either northwest or northeast of China will be modest tourism contributors volume-wise, relative to Macau’s traditional core mainland market Guangdong, next door, noted Mr Wu. But he pointed out that visitors from the far north – having come so far – are more likely to stay for at least one night compared to their southern compatriots.
It is only three months since China’s State Council made its first IVS-list update since pre-pandemic times, designating two mainland large-population centres – Qingdao and Xi’an – as eligible for IVS.
For the first four months of this year, the aggregate of Qingdao and Xi’an visitors to Macau was 30,000 and 56,000, respectively, Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) mentioned in a Friday release. It did not give a breakdown on what form of exit visa from China those people were using.
But the 86,000 from the two combined, represented only 1.07 percent of the 8.03-million visitor arrivals from mainland China during the first four months of this year. That is according to a separate set of data from Macaus Statistics and Census Service. Of the 8.03 million, nearly 53.1 percent – or 4.26 million – made use of IVS permits.
The top three mainland markets supplying IVS travellers to Macau in the January to April period were: Guangdong province (2.83 million), Shanghai (321,074) and Beijing (189,194).
The IVS-traveller volume for January to April inclusive represented a recovery rate of 88.78 percent, relative to the 4.80 million in the same period in 2019, according to census service data.
