Visitors to Macau down in Oct despite Golden Week

Nov 23, 2015 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck  

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Visitor arrivals to Macau numbered 2.64 million in October, down by 0.6 percent year-on-year, data from the city’s Statistics and Census Service showed on Monday. The monthly tally of visitors to the city has declined year-on-year in seven of the first 10 months of 2015.

Monday’s data showed that same-day visitors dropped by 3.8 percent year-on-year while overnight visitors rose by 3.3 percent. The average length of stay of visitors increased by 0.1 day year-on-year to 1.1 days last month. Overnight and same-day visitors had an average stay of 2.2 days and 0.2 day respectively.

The number of visitors to Macau in October includes the period of China’s Golden Week holiday marking National Day. According to official data, there were close to 1.07 million visitor arrivals recorded in Macau during the period October 1 to October 7 inclusive – a year-on-year increase of 2.7 percent.

In the full-month of October, the number of visitors from mainland China decreased by 0.4 percent from the prior-year period to 1.82 million, the statistics bureau said on Monday.

Macau’s visitor arrivals in the 10 months to October 31 decreased by 2.6 percent from the prior-year period to 25.49 million. Mainland Chinese accounted for 66.8 percent of the aggregate number of visitors in the first 10 months this year – or 17.03 million visitors, down by 3.5 percent year-on-year.

Investment analysts have said that headline visitor numbers are not directly correlated to overall gaming demand, as gross gaming revenue (GGR) in the Macau market has been typically skewed to high-end play. Macau’s casino GGR for October fell by 28.4 percent year-on-year to MOP20.06 billion (US$2.5 billion), show official data.

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